Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social Impacts of Rapid Urbanization in a Context of Economic Liberalization

Emory University, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Emory University doctoral candidate Sujit Shrestha, under the guidance of Dr. David Nugent, will conduct ethnographic research on the social impacts of rapid urbanization in contexts of economic liberalization. Around the world, populations of urban poor have been increasingly concentrated in squatter settlements. The researcher will explore this transformation in Kathmandu, an appropriate context for investigating such socioeconomic changes because it represents a site where economic liberalization practices have been pursued following a period of political instability. The researcher asks how individuals living in squatter communities, given their vast ethnic and social diversity, cooperate politically in a context that is otherwise characterized by a highly ethnicized national political environment. This project details the political processes through which groups of marginalized urban squatters struggle to assert various claims such as landownership and demands for secured housing. The researcher will employ participant observation, interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis to collect ethnographic data from squatter groups, governmental agencies, as well as other key actors. This research project has the potential to make significant theoretical contributions to our understanding of rapid urbanization, an important theoretical field given the growth in proportion of the world's population that is living in cities. The researcher will also investigate how broader processes such as economic liberalization and urbanization acquire counterintuitive meanings for specific marginalized groups and how the groups involved then contest the contradictions thus effected. The project will advance scientific understandings of governance, socioeconomic change, and urban citizenship. The analysis of the connections between competing modes of citizenship, local politics, and urbanization in the developing world will be of particular interest to scholars, policymakers, as well as others engaged in the field of development. The project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.