Dr. Lisa Björkman

Assistant Professor

Department of Urban and Public Affairs

Dr. Lisa Björkman joined the Urban Affairs faculty at University of Louisville in 2015. Dr. Björkman’s research has been based primarily in the Indian city of Mumbai, where she studies how global processes of urbanism and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial exclusions and inclusions, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contestation and representation. Her first book Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2015) was awarded the American Institute of Indian Studies' 2014 Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Dr. Björkman has recently edited a special issue of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research titled “Engineering cities: mediating materialities, infrastructural imaginaries and shifting regimes of urban expertise” (February 2018), in which she authored both theoretical introduction and an ethnographic article titled ““The Engineer and the Plumber: mediating Mumbai’s conflicting infrastructural imaginaries.” Dr. Björkman is preparing two book new book manuscripts for submission this summer: the first is titled Bombay Brokers: anthropological theory from the ethnographic edge; the second Afterlives of World Class Ruins: an Anthropology of the Future. A third in-progress ethnographic monograph, titled Mass Political Theatre: an anthropology of representation in Mumbai, is in progress. Dr. Björkman is currently a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.