My ongoing book project Permanent Slums argues that urban governance has reached an impasse, where policy imaginations and governmental practices are framed and limited by the slum despite desires for slum-free cities. I draw on ten years of field and archival research on the exemplary case of Hyderabad (India), an emerging global city, where slum improvement has been a central focus for decades but 30% of the population still lives in slums. The book reveals the contradictory effects of a slum impasse by asking: how did slums shift from being a problem to be eradicated to becoming a technique of governance? What does this slum governance entail for the politics and political economy of the city at large? Finally, from the perspective of slum residents, what are the structural opportunities and obstacles posed by slum governance in pursuing economic mobility and a politics of citizenship? I demonstrate that prevailing modes of governing poverty through slums attempts to permanently inscribe poor groups into racialized regimes of property and caste-stratified markets, thus legally producing second-class citizens.
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2023. “Waiting for Dignity Housing: Cruel governance and unaccounted time in Hyderabad.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (1).
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. “Of Political Entrepreneurs: Assembling Community and Social Capital in Hyderabad’s Informal Settlements.” Urban Studies, Online First (2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211014120.
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, Ryan Stock, and Karan Misquitta. “Titling as a Contested Process: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45, no. 3 (2021): 458–76.
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. “Citizenship as a Communicative Effect.” Signs and Society 6, no. 3 (2018): 531–57.
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. “I’m not there – A Hyderabad / Philadelphia Parallax,” Ethnographic Marginalia, September 7, 2021,
K., Manav, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. “Affordable Rental Housing Complexes for Urban Migrants: Problems and Prospects,” India in Transition, March 1, 2021, https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/manavk-indivarjonnalagadda.
Minhaz, Ayesha, and Indivar Jonnalagadda, “Urban Local Bodies are critical in the fight against COVID-19.” Hyderabad Urban Lab Blog, March 30, 2020, https://hydlab.in/blogposts/strengthen-urban-local-bodies.
College of Arts & Sciences Research Grant, Miami University (2024)
Thomas Zwicker Memorial Fund Award, University of Pennsylvania (2023)
Graduate Fellowship, The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (2021-2022)
Mellon Graduate Student Research Award, Penn Humanities+Urbanism+Design Initiative (2021)
Dissertation Research Grant, The Wenner-Gren Foundation (2020-2021)
Joseph W. Elder Social Sciences Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies (2019-2020)
Geo L. Harrison Graduate Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania (2018-2019)
Summer Field Research Grant, Penn Department of Anthropology (2017 & 2018)