David André Karnail Singh

• Presentation
• Research outputs
• Prizes

I hold a PhD in development studies from the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). This dissertation was defended in September 2023 and awarded the prestigious Ester Boserup Thesis Prize 2024 from the University of Copenhagen.

My research interests focus largely on the socio-political transformations induced by global flows and circulation of capital and the rise of authoritarian regimes in South Asia. I investigate the related reconfiguration of territory, land, and of the contours of the nation, as well as extractive energy transitions and green infrastructures' relations with citizenship and the state, from a political ecology and critical agrarian studies perspective. My PhD dissertation analysed the territorial expansion of wind infrastructures in borderland Gujarat (western India), and the underlying extraction, dispossession and destruction dynamics. I also discussed the issue of mediation and caste power in fixing large-scale wind power projects and renegotiating the contours of the local state, the reconfiguration of space by identity politics and Hindu nationalism and the emergence of diverse resistance practices. During my postdoc at IFRO, I now turn to the new bulldozer regime or 'bulldozer raj' that unfolds in major cities of South Asia, the making of (urban) citizenship, differentiated land access and legality at the urban frontier. I wish to understand the mobilisation of notions of legality by upper-class and upper-caste social groups in order design excluding, hierarchical and policed urban spaces where boundaries of caste, class, religion and gender are duly reinforced.