Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social Impacts of Rapid Urbanization in a Context of Economic Liberalization

埃默里大学博士候选人Sujit Shrestha在大卫纽金特博士的指导下，将对经济自由化背景下快速城市化的社会影响进行人种学研究。在世界各地，城市贫民越来越集中在棚户区。研究人员将探讨这种转变在加德满都，一个适当的背景下调查这种社会经济变化，因为它代表了一个网站，经济自由化的做法已经追求了一段时间的政治不稳定。研究人员询问居住在棚户区社区的个人，鉴于其巨大的种族和社会多样性，在一个以高度种族化的国家政治环境为特征的背景下如何进行政治合作。该项目详细介绍了被边缘化的城市棚户群体争取土地所有权和保障住房要求等各种权利主张的政治进程。研究人员将采用参与观察，访谈，档案研究和话语分析，收集来自棚户区，政府机构，以及其他关键行为者的民族志数据。这个研究项目有可能为我们理解快速城市化做出重要的理论贡献，这是一个重要的理论领域，因为世界上居住在城市的人口比例正在增长。研究人员还将调查经济自由化和城市化等更广泛的进程如何对特定的边缘化群体产生反直觉的意义，以及所涉群体如何对由此产生的矛盾进行斗争。该项目将促进对治理、社会经济变革和城市公民的科学理解。对发展中国家的公民身份、地方政治和城市化的竞争模式之间的联系进行分析，将对学者、决策者以及从事发展领域的其他人特别感兴趣。该项目还有助于培养一名研究生。

Emory University doctoral candidate Sujit Shrestha, under the guidance of Dr. David Nugent, will conduct ethnographic research on the social impacts of rapid urbanization in contexts of economic liberalization. Around the world, populations of urban poor have been increasingly concentrated in squatter settlements. The researcher will explore this transformation in Kathmandu, an appropriate context for investigating such socioeconomic changes because it represents a site where economic liberalization practices have been pursued following a period of political instability. The researcher asks how individuals living in squatter communities, given their vast ethnic and social diversity, cooperate politically in a context that is otherwise characterized by a highly ethnicized national political environment. This project details the political processes through which groups of marginalized urban squatters struggle to assert various claims such as landownership and demands for secured housing. The researcher will employ participant observation, interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis to collect ethnographic data from squatter groups, governmental agencies, as well as other key actors. This research project has the potential to make significant theoretical contributions to our understanding of rapid urbanization, an important theoretical field given the growth in proportion of the world's population that is living in cities. The researcher will also investigate how broader processes such as economic liberalization and urbanization acquire counterintuitive meanings for specific marginalized groups and how the groups involved then contest the contradictions thus effected. The project will advance scientific understandings of governance, socioeconomic change, and urban citizenship. The analysis of the connections between competing modes of citizenship, local politics, and urbanization in the developing world will be of particular interest to scholars, policymakers, as well as others engaged in the field of development. The project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.