Carol Upadhya

Fellow, SCAS.
Visiting Professor, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru

Social anthropologist Carol Upadhya (PhD, Yale University) is a Visiting Professor at the School of
Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru. Upadhya has researched
and published widely on a range of social transformations in contemporary India related to economic
development, urbanization and migration, including the reconfiguration of caste and class structures;
the sociology of the Indian IT industry and workforce; and development interventions by regional dia-
sporas. As Professor and Head of the Urban & Mobility Studies Programme at NIAS, Upadhya has
directed several major research programs, most recently the collaborative NSF-funded project
‘Speculative Urbanism: Land, Livelihoods, and Finance Capital’ – a comparative study of real-estate-led
urban development in Bengaluru and Jakarta.

Upadhya is author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford
University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities
and Development Politics (Routledge, 2018). Her recent publications include ‘Dispossession without
displacement: Producing property through slum redevelopment in Bengaluru, India’, Environment and
Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022 (with Deeksha M Rao) and ‘Recasting land: Agrarian urbanism
in Amaravati’, Urbanisation, 2021. She is also co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Development
(Sage).

During her Fellowship at SCAS, Upadhya will work on a monograph on the imagination, planning,
execution and collapse of a ‘world-city’ mega-project (Amaravati) in Andhra Pradesh, India, based
on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the region. The book will provide a unique contribution to
current debates around urbanization, land transformations, neoliberal development, and inequality in
the global South.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2022-23.