Dr. Loraine Kennedy invited Mr. Ram Mohan Chitta, her collaborator in Hyderabad, India, to the SGEP’s Urban Governance discussion on December 13, 2021. Dr. Kennedy and Mr. Chitta introduced key policy issues in housing for the urban poor as an entry point for the study of shifting geographies of statehood and political authority in Telangana, India’s newest state. Telangana was formed in 2014 after a decades-long struggle for territory and recognition. Dr. Kennedy’s research investigates the impact of this political re-territorialization on knowledge production and the policymaking processes. Based on empirical evidence from the “Dignity Housing” scheme, which intends to deliver for free 100,000 apartments to households living below the poverty line in Hyderabad, the project aims to accomplish two primary goals. One is to examine how rescaled state space in Telangana articulates with political authority and interrogates the changing relationships between experts and policymaking. The other is to understand how the housing policy is situated within the wider context of urban development politics in Hyderabad; in particular, the political management of informal settlements and urban land. Before this project on housing for the urban poor, Dr. Kennedy and Mr. Chitta collaborated on the publication “Interrogating Data Justice on Hyderabad’s Urban Frontier: Information Politics and the Internal Differentiation of Vulnerable Communities”.
After becoming a fellow at SGEP, Dr. Kennedy started a new project with the French Institute of Pondicherry called “Urbanizing Chennai”, which focuses on the role that urban peripheries play in promoting economic growth and sustainability. To document and decipher the profound transformation of metropolitan Chennai over the last three decades, the project seeks to expand the existing knowledge base by bridging diverse research fields and identifying new investigation sites. It builds on a growing body of literature on urban peripheries in the global South, including a recent special issue co-edited by Dr Kennedy.
In January 2022, Dr. Kennedy chaired a panel at the Urban Arc conference “Beyond Binaries” hosted by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, India. The panel showcased a forthcoming volume, co-edited with Dr. Ashima Sood, called India’s Greenfield Urban Future, and included presentations from five of the book’s contributing authors. Also in this month, Dr. Kennedy co-organized with Dr. Karen Coelho a virtual event, the third Urban Studies Foundation (USF) International Workshop, at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. Titled “Inside and outside ‘ordinary city’ margins”, the workshop highlighted the research of four USF International Fellows from Brazil, India, Nigeria, and the Philippines, and facilitated a dialogue with India-based urban scholars. It also provided a platform for six young Fellows from the “Writing Urban India” initiative, supported by the USF, to share their work. The USF is a Scottish charitable organization dedicated to advancing academic research and education in the field of urban studies across the globe. Dr. Kennedy is currently serving as a Trustee for USF.
Dr. Loraine Kennedy serves as a CNRS Research Director, at the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. She has long been interested in policymaking in India, and increasingly in international comparison. Dr. Kennedy’s strong interest in comparative research started in the 2010s when she participated in a European project (FP7) called “Chance2Sustain”. In that project, Dr. Kennedy coordinated research on urban mega-projects in four countries of the global South (Brazil, India, Peru, and South Africa). Subsequently, she explored comparatively state rescaling and sub-national policymaking in China and India, through a special issue, published in 2017.
Originally from the United States, Dr. Kennedy has lived in France since moving to Paris for graduate school in the late 1980s. Currently, Dr. Kennedy is based in India where she is affiliated with the French Institute of Pondicherry and conducting collaborative research in both Chennai and Hyderabad.