Doctoral Dissertation Research: Rapid Infrastructural Development, Mobility, and Changing Spatial and Social Relations

The quality, role, and impact of transport infrastructure are at the center stage of discussions on development and accessibility. How does increasing vehicular traffic, road networks and associated urbanization affect particular regional economies? How do changes and challenges to infrastructural development at the local level impact regional identities and even national debates? Given the increasing significance of infrastructure politics in the regional and national American identity and politics, understanding the factors and processes that constitute them can help us determine the varied regional patterns, gaps and impacts in such infrastructure development, crucial to cross-country differences and development. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in discovering more effective means of improving public infrastructure.

Bhoomika Joshi, under the supervision of Dr. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan of Yale University will explore what impact new mobilities created through rapid infrastructural development have on social and spatial relationships. This project aims to understand the role of road transport in the regional hill economy of the Indian Himalayas. This setting provides a laboratory for investigating the effects of rapid infrastructural development where roads are the principle method of transport. India is the fastest growing manufacturer of automobiles with a rapidly expanding road network that has fueled varied aspirations and expectations at the regional level. Given that the extent and network of roads and mass road transport has increased rapidly in the high reaches of the Himalayas over the last decade, this project will examine how that has affected the urban life, business networks and regional identity in the region. It is a mixed method and multi-sited project that will be conducted over a total period of 16 months and across three sites in the Indian Himalayas. Since road transport is the only mode of mobility in the region, the proposed research at three different sites is crucial to understanding the kinds of infrastructure politics it determines through the prism of new forms of urban economy, new patterns of mobility and newly shaped identities in the ecologically fragile and fast changing Himalayan landscape. It will use a combination of semi-structured interviews and surveys with drivers and transporters, life histories of old residents and travelers and interviews with transport bureaucrats in addition to archival research and mobile ethnography (travelling between small towns in shared taxis). The proposed research will provide a much-needed analysis of infrastructure politics at the regional level and its impact on the regional economy and identity which will not only provide the analytical tools for investigating and determining such patterns in the United States of America but even globally.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.