Political Ecologies of Caste, Class and Precarious Labour in Indian Cities

Indian cities are pushing for more techno-managerial and capital-intensive approaches to urban environmental governance under national flagship programs such as Clean India, Smart Cities, etc. Drawing on the rhetorics of modernity, aesthetics, smartness, and ‘sustainability’, Patna is also modernising and mechanising its municipal solid waste management system with the objective of eliminating manual handling of solid waste. With no robust guidelines on the formal integration of ‘informally’ and 'precariously' employed dalit waste recyclers, these normative, often apolitical discourses and techno-managerial practices have rendered the questions, claims, struggles, and rights of dalits invisible while generating new forms of inequalities, uncertainties and insecurities for dalit communities who embody these spaces for labour, livelihoods and living.

My PhD research aims to document and examine how these normative discourses and material practices around urban environmentalism are (re)producing uneven and unjust dalit ecologies in Patna. Informed by the 'situated' and 'embodied' approaches to Urban Political Ecology, and using qualitative ethnographic methods, I aim to document the everyday embodied precarity of dalit waste recyclers and how their experiences of precarity are shaped by their caste-dominated intersectional identities. I am also interested in the role of their bodies, both discursive and material, and the embodiments of emotions, stigma, struggles, etc. in shaping their everyday labour and socio-spatial interactions. I will also document how dalit communities resist, adapt and navigate through these shifting ecologies, both at individual and collective scales. I hope, through this project, I will be able to both advocate and respond to the calls from political ecologists for using 'caste' as a concrete analytical lens to study the urban, its planning and processes, and the socio-ecological inequalities, injustices and unfreedoms in Indian cities, in ways 'gender' and 'race' have been/are being used across geographies and scales.

Thesis title: Political Ecologies of Caste, Class and Precarious Labour in Indian Cities

Supervisors: Dr Glyn Williams and Dr Aidan While

Education:

BA in Korean Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

MA in International Studies and Development Cooperation at Yonsei University, Seoul

MA in Social Research at the University of Sheffield,

Sheffield PhD in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield

[PhD funded by the ESRC White Rose DTP 1+3 studentship]