Religious discourse in municipal electoral campaigning (completed)
My current research extends my doctoral work on the everyday politics of water access in the Indian city of Mumbai along two avenues of inquiry: first, drawing on ethnographic research conducted during the 2012 Municipal Corporation election in Mumbai, I am exploring the role that money plays in municipal elections, investigating the relationship between flows of cash and processes of ethno-religious, socio-cultural identification and political mobilization. Secondly, I am exploring how the everyday materialities of urban infrastructure produce and constrain the political life of the city by generating particularly urban forms of risk and speculation. In addition to these ongoing research pursuits, I am working on a book manuscript based on my doctoral research. Taking water both as a proxy for exploring the nature and functioning of power, and as a resource whose distribution is worth studying in its own right, the book theorizes the interventions and forces – political, social, hydrological – that both produce and inhabit flows of water through the globalizing city.