Associate Professor
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Liza Weinstein Biography
Liza Weinstein
Areas of Expertise
Cities and globalization
Urban political economy
Politics of informality
State-civil society relations with a regional focus on India
About
Liza Weinstein is an associate professor of sociology at Northeastern University. Her research and teaching interests focus on cities and globalization, urban political economy, the politics of informality, and state-civil society relations with a regional focus on India. She is the author of The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai(University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Based on historical and ethnographic research in Mumbai’s infamous Dharavi settlement, the book examines the Indian state’s changing response to residential informality in the context of economic globalization and global city formation. Her current research is a comparative and historical study of residential evictions and housing rights activism in five Indian cities.
Project Description
Liza Weinstein will use the support provided by the Health Equity Faculty Scholar program to begin exploratory research on the role that legal exclusion plays in explaining poor health outcomes of residents of urban slums in India. Expanding on concept of “legal exclusion” developed in studies of immigrant health, this research, conducted in collaboration with research partners in Mumbai and at Tufts School of Public Health, aims to explain how informal settlements are legally excluded spaces, producing both exclusion at the individual and community levels. This project is employing community based research in the Kaula Bundar slum in Eastern Mumbai and draws upon longstanding research connections in the community.
Publications – Past Five Years
Weinstein, L. (2014). The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Weinstein, L. (2017). Insecurity as confinement: The entrenched politics of staying put in Delhi and Mumbai. International Sociology, 32(4), 512-531. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580917701604
Weinstein, L., Rumbauch, A., & Sinha, S. (2019). Resilient Growth: Fantasy Plans and Unplanned Developments in India’s Flood‐Prone Coastal Cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 273-291.