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.
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2023. “Waiting for Dignity Housing: Slum Redevelopment, Cruel Governance, and Unaccounted Time in Hyderabad.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (1): 69-86. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2022. “Of Political Entrepreneurs: Assembling Community and Social Capital in Hyderabad’s Informal Settlements.” Urban Studies 59 (4): 717–33. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, Ryan Stock, and Karan Misquitta. 2021. “Titling as a Contested Process: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (3): 458–76. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2018. “Citizenship as a Communicative Effect.” Signs and Society 6 (3): 531–57. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. “I’m not there – A Hyderabad / Philadelphia Parallax,” Ethnographic Marginalia, September 7, 2021,
K., Manav, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. “Affordable Rental Housing Complexes for Urban Migrants: Problems and Prospects,” India in Transition, March 1, 2021, https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/manavk-indivarjonnalagadda.
Minhaz, Ayesha, and Indivar Jonnalagadda, “Urban Local Bodies are critical in the fight against COVID-19.” Hyderabad Urban Lab Blog, March 30, 2020, https://hydlab.in/blogposts/strengthen-urban-local-bodies.
College of Arts & Sciences Research Grant, Miami University (2024)
Thomas Zwicker Memorial Fund Award, University of Pennsylvania (2023)
Graduate Fellowship, The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (2021-2022)
Mellon Graduate Student Research Award, Penn Humanities+Urbanism+Design Initiative (2021)
Dissertation Research Grant, The Wenner-Gren Foundation (2020-2021)
Joseph W. Elder Social Sciences Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies (2019-2020)
Geo L. Harrison Graduate Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania (2018-2019)
Summer Field Research Grant, Penn Department of Anthropology (2017 & 2018)