[Urbanstudy] Seminar by Sapana Doshi on "The Redevelopmental State: Governing Dispossession through Desire and Difference" Mumbai July 5

[lalitha kamath]

For all those in Mumbai on July 5:

The School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, takes pleasure in inviting you to a seminar by Sapana Doshi on "The Redevelopmental State: Governing Dispossession through Desire and Difference" on July 5 from 2-4pm at Kumarappa Hall, Nowroji Campus, TISS. Below is a synopsis of the talk and a brief bio of the speaker. We welcome you all to attend.


Date: July 5, 2013
Time: 2-4 pm
Venue: Kumarappa Hall, Academic Building 2, Nowroji Campus, TISS, Deonar Farm Road, Deonar, Mumbai
Lecture Synopsis
“The Redevelopmental State: Governing Dispossession through Desire and Difference” 
While scholars of Indian development have traditionally focused on the state’s role in agriculture and industry, recent processes of economic growth in cities reveal changing political geographies. State-mediated slum clearances for “world-class” real estate and infrastructure constitute a key strategy for capital accumulation today. And yet how does “the state” legitimate and manage large-scale displacements in a city as politically vibrant as Mumbai? Answering this question, I argue, requires examining recent reconfigurations of urban governance within and beyond the boundaries of the formal state. Drawing on eighteen months of qualitative fieldwork in Mumbai, this study conceptualizes hegemonic state formations by examining three interconnected processes. The first is the establishment of market-based slum redevelopment policies in Mumbai in the 1990’s. During this time, forces of economic liberalization, party politics, NGO mediation, and
 slum residents’ desires for improved living converged with violent and exclusionary regionalist and Hindu nationalist urban imaginaries to produce a highly uneven compensatory framework. The second concerns the remaking of spaces of political participation including both the contraction in residents’ access to effective avenues for negotiating slum redevelopment with public officials and the uneven expansion of non-governmental arenas of privatized rule. Traversing all of these processes are the changing political subjectivities in slums—fractured through disparate experiences of displacement, ethico-political mediation, and embodied class, gender, and communal identities. I conclude by claiming that the “redevelopment” of state-space has transformed the very meaning of urban citizenship, producing new contentions, crises, and political mobilizations. 

Sapana Doshi Bio
Sapana Doshi is Assistant Professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona where she teaches critical development studies, political geography, global urbanization, and feminist theory. Professor Doshi received her PhD in 2011 from the Department of Geography of the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent project explores the political economy and cultural politics of slum evictions and redevelopment in Mumbai and investigates how urban displacements are politically legitimated, contested, and negotiated. Her work combines feminist, post-structural, and Marxist theoretical lenses to understand how class, gender, and other intersecting social differences shape capitalist governance and political mobilizations. Professor Doshi’s published and forthcoming articles appear in peer-reviewed journals including Antipode: Journal of Radical Geography, Geopolitics, and Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel
 Center. She has also contributed to two edited volumes—Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability and Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Spaces in Indian Cities. She has received numerous research grants including awards from the Social Science Research Council and the Society for Women Geographers, and has been invited to present her work throughout the United States and in Hong Kong. 
More information at: http://geography.arizona.edu/sdoshi
PDFs of recent publications available at: http://sapanadoshi.org/publications/
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