Across the Global South, over a billion people are estimated to be living in so-called slum settlements. And that number is growing. My book titled Permanent Slums: Poverty, Property, and the Production of Second-class Citizenship argues that despite the magnitude of the challenge, slum improvement laws and policies are based on a contradictory premise. While slums are defined as temporary and interstitial urban phenomena which need to be improved, I show that actually existing practices treat slums as permanent features of Global South cities. The people whose stories constitute my book all live in one of the 1400 slum neighborhoods in Hyderabad, India. Today, these neighborhoods are economically vibrant, socially diverse, and legally recognized, thus defying media and policy stereotypes. By following the aspirations of my interlocutors, I argue that policies of slum governance ostensibly designed to upgrade infrastructure, to advance economic capacities, and to improve lives, are instead effectively obstructing people's capabilities and erasing their humanity.

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At a time when populism is gaining currency as a global buzzword, contemporary theories tend to focus on charismatic leaders and institutional breakdown, but leave a more fundamental question unanswered: how are the conditions for populist politics produced in the first place? My book project addresses this question based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the rapidly transforming city of Hyderabad, India, where populism is normal rather than exceptional. Instead of treating populism as a top-down imposition, I argue that everyday populism is a multi-scalar process through which ordinary struggles over property and environment are converted into political value for competing political projects. My account spans the micro-scale of people’s everyday political engagements in struggles over land and water, the meso-scale where reactive governance actively produces and manages political instability, and the macro-scale where political value is absorbed into spectacular populist campaigns through disruptive media ecologies. Across these scales, I theorize populism as a product of the material conditions of urban governance and media circulation.

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Between 2014-2016, as a Research Associate on a Ford Foundation funded project anchored at Hyderabad Urban Lab, I conducted ethnographic research across three cities: Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam; collaboratively carried out analysis of policy discourse, geospatial data, and survey data; helped build relationships and networks among grassroots activists and organizations; among other project activities. The goal of the project was to bridge "1) the gap between local experience in different cities and state and national level housing rights strategies; 2) the gap between housing rights and allied rights such as rights to work, education, health and clean environment."

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As a Research Associate at Hyderabad Urban Lab, I conducted ethnographic research and contributed to collaborative projects addressing a range of topics related to sanitation such as public toilet management, the politics of community toilets, and the gendered differentials of access to sanitation. I helped coordinate and organize an online campaign called #DontHoldItIn to spread awareness on the massive shortcomings in public sanitation facilities for women. I also worked with community based organizations to support their advocacy programs and their movements to demand better infrastructures.

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In 2015, I was the main Research Assistant on an Education International funded project on low-cost private schools and their interface with multinational edu-businesses. The objective of the study was to examine at various scales the ascendant edu-businesses and startups in Hyderabad providing tech solutions to schools, and to document the processes by which low-cost private schools were replacing public schools as the preferred option for poor families in the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana region. The goal was to provide concrete data and insights for the teachers, scholars and activists who are concerned by the rapid privatization of education across the world.

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Image: Christoph Niemann

My MA dissertation project was titled "Networking Change? The Culture of Free and Open Source Software Communities in India". In this research, I examined the actually existing political and ideological positions of open source software developers in India. Based on interviews with thirty key-informants and discourse analysis of publicly archived online discussion groups, I argue that FOSS developers espouse a pragmatic politics interested in defending certain fundamental ideals and infrastructures such as open standards and net neutrality, while being agnostic about others such as intellectual property rights. This dissertation is about information technology, knowledge production, and community ethics.

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