Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and urban anthropologist. An Associate Professor at the University of Louisville, she is currently based at the Malmö’s Institute of Urban Research. Lisa is author of Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015); Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories (Columbia University Press, 2020); Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021); and Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press). Lisa’s new ethnographic collaboration, Napoli Navigators is forthcoming with Berghahn Books in 2027.
Research Themes
Global Urbanism aims to explore the heterogeneity/diversity of urban conditions, practices and experiences in different geographical locations. It aims to highlight how contemporary urban theorization reflects (or fails to reflect) this diversity. The theme challenges assumed urban hierarchies and highlights urban practices outside the mainstream state-led and market-led frameworks, particularly activities carried out by people…
At the IUR, urban humanities mobilizes humanities scholars to engage with the full range of human expression in and of the urban, from literature and visual culture to public art, the built environment, memory, and heritage. These explorations open new ways of understanding and imagining urban space, lived cities, and the cultural object we call…