Naomi P. Hazarika

My doctoral dissertation, Em/Dis-Placed: Caste, Gender, and the Politics of Slum Redevelopment in Delhi, India, examines Delhi's first—and ultimately "failed"—in-situ slum redevelopment project to argue that urban redevelopment policies cannot be understood simply through the binary of displacement versus emplacement. Instead, I develop the concept of 'em/dis-placement' to show how redevelopment simultaneously displaces and emplaces caste-marginalized residents through uneven regimes of welfare housing, temporal citizenship, and gendered financial extraction. 

Building on this research, I draw together feminist urban geography, economic geography, and the global geographies of caste to examine how urban transformation produces new forms of inequality. I ask:         

(1) How do policies of urban redevelopment reproduce, transform, and spatialize caste and gender hierarchies in cities?

(2) How do digital financial technologies and GIS-driven infrastructures expand legibility while producing new forms of indebtedness that deepen gendered and caste-based—or, in comparative contexts, racially stratified—inequalities in informal settlements?

3) How does caste as a socio-spatial structure of power travel across the globe?