I am a political ethnographer with a research focus primarily in the Indian city of Mumbai. My work has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention and representation. My first book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015) was awarded the American Institute of Indian Studies Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. My second monograph, Waiting Town: life in transit and Mumbai’s other world-class histories, will be published in November 2020 by Columbia University Press (Association of Asian Studies). I have also convened and edited a collaborative monograph titled Bombay Brokers, which is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2021. I am currently researching a book-length study of the theatrical idiom of Mumbai’s political life.

Research Interests: South Asia, infrastructures, displacement and migration, new materialisms, mass politics

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, Politics, New School for Social Research

Bachelor of Arts, History, Reed College

Courses

UPA 602: The Urban Political

UPA 680: Urban Ethnography

UPA 680: Urban Dis/placement and Dis/possession

Field Courses (e.g., Naples, Mumbai, Louisville)

Recent Publications

Bombay Brokers: urban ethnography across the gap (Björkman, ed). Forthcoming with Duke University Press (forthcoming 2021).

Waiting Town: life in transit and Mumbai’s other world-class histories. Association of Asian Studies, Asia Shorts (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Björkman, Lisa and Chitra Venkataramani (2019) “Mediating Mumbai: ethnographic explorations of urban ‘linkage’.” International Planning Studies, 24:1, 81-95.

Björkman, Lisa (with Alan M. Jacobs and Tim Büthe et al) (2019) “The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: An Overview” in Perspectives on Politics.

Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai. Duke University Press (2015); Orient BlackSwan (2015). Awarded American Institute of Indian Studies Joseph W. Elder Prize (2014)