Dr. Sushmita Pati

Education

• BA in Political Science, Lady Shriram College, Delhi University
• MA, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
• MPhil, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
• PhD, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Profile

Dr. Sushmita Pati is a political scientist who has taught previously at Delhi University and Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her research interests include Urban politics, Political Economy, State and Democracy, and Gender.

Sushmita’s work focuses on how politics and political life shapes up at the cusp of urbanism and political economy. Her first monograph Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. It is the recipient of the prestigious BASAS Book Prize (Joint Winner 2024) and the BISA-IPEG Book Prize (2023). Prior to NLS, she taught at Azim Premji University, St Stephens College, Delhi University, and Ramjas College, Delhi University.

She was awarded with a Postdoctoral Fellowship at ICAS-MP for the year 2019, QES-AS fellowship at University of Victoria, Canada, 2018 as well as a DAAD fellowship at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August- Universität, Göttingen, Germany, 2014. She serves as a member of the Editorial Collective at City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, and as the Faculty Board Member for Socio Legal Review.

Publications

Books: 

• 2022. Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

• 2024. Did India ever have a Right to the City Movement? Rethinking Housing Justice Today, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 48(4).
• 2023. Author Exchange with Prof. Mukulika Banerjee, London School of Economics for APSA Newsletter titled “The Troubling State of India’s Democracy”, Democracy and Autocracy, 21, no.2 for Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, University of Michigan.
• 2023. Adam Abdullah, Ricardo Cadoso,  Shreyashi Dasgupta, Sushmita Pati, Rebekah Pluckehan, Tanzil Shafique, Abdoumaliq Simone, Shaun Teo, Junija Ye, Yimin, Zhao. “Re-Arranging the Urban: Forms, Rhythms, Politics”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 48, no.4, 718-744.
• 2019.  “The Productive Fuzziness of Land Documents: The State and Processes of Accumulation in Urban Villages of Delhi”, Contributions to Indian Sociology 53, no.2, 249-271.
• 2018. “Building Monuments in a World Class City: Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Delhi”. Book chapter in Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann (eds) India and its Visual Cultures: Community, Class and Gender in a Symbolic Landscape, Sage Publications
• 2016. “Accumulation by  Possession: The Social Processes of  Rent  Seeking  in Urban Delhi” Book chapter in Ranabir Samaddar, Samita Sen and Iman Kumar Mitra (eds) Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism, Springer.
• 2014.“Jagmohan: The Master Planner and the Rebuilding of the City”, Special Article, Economic and Political Weekly, September 6.
• 2012. “A Nation Set in Stone”: An Insight into the Politics of Statuary in Delhi (1950- 1965)”, Special Article, Economic and Political Weekly, July 28.
  (co-authored with Rajarshi Sen) “Unpacking  Choice: What does  Feminist  Theory  have  to  Rethink Through Nari Niketan Cases?”, Journal of Indian Law and Society, 4(30) Winter, 2012.

Book Reviews and Working Papers:

• 2024. Book Review, Sujata Patel, D. Parthasarathy and George Jose, eds. Mumbai/Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing., Studies in Indian Politics, 149-151.
• 2022. Book Review, “Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure”, Contributions to Indian Sociology 56, no.2
• 2015. Working Paper, “The Regime of Registers: Land Ownership and State Planning in Urban Villages of Delhi” SOAS South Asia Institute Working Papers, 2015, Vol1, Pp.17-31
• 2014.  Working Paper, “The Making of the Rentier Jat: Land, Rent and the Social Processes of Accumulation in South Delhi”, Policies and Practices 67, “Accumulation under Post- Colonial Capitalism-IV- Mobile Labour and the New Urban”, November
• 2013. Book Review Abdul Shaban’s Mumbai: Political Economy of Crime and Space, Orient Blackswan, published in 2010 for Contemporary South Asia, Volume 21, Issue 3

Articles in the Press/Media:

• Opinion Piece “A New Language for Housing Justice?”  India In Transition, CASI, University of Pennsylvania, July 3, 2023.
• Opinion Piece, “From Bulldozer ‘Justice’ to Migrants Walking Home: Political Organising has Ignored Housing Rights”, Scroll, July 11, 2023.
• Opinion piece, “What the Bangalore Floods tell us about our Democracy”,. Indiaforum: A Journal Magazine on Contemporary Issues. September 18, 2022.
• Podcast. “Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi”, New Books Network, July 2022.
• Opinion Piece, “Not Bothered by the ITI Workers’ Plight? One Day Soon, it Could be Yours Too”, Deccan Herald. 19th January 2022.
• Interview. With Youth Policy Review. 3rd May 2021. https://www.youthpolicyreview.com/post/interviewdrsushmitapati
• Opinion Piece, “The Right Time to Speak of Housing Rights in India is Right Now”, The Wire. 22nd July 2020.
• Podcast, “The Unregulated Underbelly” with Dr. Vijay Raghavan, TISS Mumbai and Dr. S Anukriti, Boston College, Syntalk. December 2019.
• Web Article, “Anxieties of ‘Dabanggai: Tales from Delhi’s Urban Villages” in Café Dissensus, Issue 35, special issue on Masculinity/ies in Urban India, May 2017.