This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization‐era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self‐evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world‐class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization‐era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect.
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1
In Mumbai elections, an influx of money is not leading to the commoditization of the vote. Rather, as ethnographic analysis shows, actors involved with moving money have divergent and sometimes‐conflicting aspirations, motivations, and agendas, within which cash plays multiple roles simultaneously. Election‐time cash flow inhabits a deeply political landscape of contestation where issues at the heart of Mumbai's modernity—land use, infrastructural investment, and business prospects—are negotiated and speculated on. These findings critically engage a conceptual terrain that counterposes individual rationality and political choice to traditional forms of authority mediated by relations of patronage, while producing important insights into long‐standing anthropological debates on money and exchange. [exchange, gift, trust, money, democracy, Mumbai]
This article turns ethnographic attention to the everyday practices involved in managing the ever-present possibility of water shortage in contemporary Mumbai. Drawing on research carried out in a few different neighborhoods—both popular as well as “world class”—that are supplied water by a single reservoir, Björkman’s essay highlights the social and political fields through which water-shortage risk is encountered, as well as the everyday practices to which such risks give rise. Water risk, it is argued, inhabits a landscape of rumor, stealth, and speculation—on materialities such as pipe locations, water pressures, and the timings and operations of valves, as well as on the networks of power and influence that might underpin the appearances and disappearances of water. These risks are hedged by means of the continuous gathering and ongoing exchange of water-related knowledge and rumor. The opacities of the water distribution system, it is shown, mean that water-related risk does not map easily onto a socioeconomic geography. Expanding the scope of research beyond moments of spectacular breakdown thus allows for attention to the means by which everyday risks of shortage are mitigated, and provides insight not only into how the poor achieve a measure of water security, but also into how the “world-class” effect of uninterrupted infrastructure is produced.
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