Liza Weinstein
Department Chair; Associate Professor of Sociology
Liza Weinstein researches and teaches on urban inequality, state power, and the politics of housing, displacement, and urban informality, with a regional focus on India and comparative global perspectives. Her work has appeared in Politics & Society, City & Community, Economy & Society, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and other journals. Her 2014 book, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press), examines the Indian state’s changing response to residential informality in the context of economic globalization and global city formation. Her new book, Logics of Dispossession: Governing by Eviction in Indian Cities (University of California Press, 2026), offers a comparative genealogy of informal settlement eviction in India’s largest cities, tracing their recurrence over more than a century as a technology of state power and racialized dispossession. She is also leading an NSF-funded collaboration with public health researchers and community-based ethnographers on legal exclusion, embodiment, and territorial stigma in non-notified settlements in Mumbai’s eastern docklands. She is currently an editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR).
“Toward a Global Urban Sociology: Keywords” (with Marco Garrido and Xuefei Ren), City and Community, online first June 19, 2020.
“Evictions: Reconceptualizing Housing Insecurity from the Global South,” City and Community, online first July 15, 2020.
“Resilient Growth: Fantasy Plans and Unplanned Developments in India’s Flood-Prone Coastal Cities,” (with Andrew Rumbach and Saumitra Sinha), International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2019): 273-291
“Insecurity as Confinement: The Entrenched Politics of Staying Put in Delhi and Mumbai,” International Sociology, 32(2017): 512–531.
The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
2020: Northeastern University, College of Social Science and Humanities, COVID-19 Research Development Initiative: ““Legal Exclusion and Community Response to Crisis in Mumbai’s Slum Settlements” ($5,000 awarded)
2019: National Science Foundation (NSF), Sociology Program: “Collaborative Research: Social Construction of Legal Exclusion in Indian Slums” ($376,999 awarded, 2-year grant)
2019: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty: “Engaging Geography in the Humanities” ($155,665 awarded)
2018: Northeastern University Health Equity Fellowship: “Embodied Legal Exclusion in an Indian Slum” ($5,000 awarded)
2018: Northeastern University Asian Studies Research Development Award “Embodied Legal Exclusion in an Indian Slum” ($2,000 awarded)
2017: Northeastern University, College of Social Science and Humanities, Research Development Initiative: “Embodied Legal Exclusion in an Indian Slum” ($5,000 awarded)
2016: Northeastern University Humanities Center 2016-2017 Faculty Fellowship: “New Urban Land Gabs? Housing Insecurity in Urban India, 1960 – 2015” (1 course release)
2014: Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship: “Demolition, Dispossession, and Resistance: Resident Evictions in Urban India” ($31,500 awarded).
2014″ Northeastern University Tier 1 Internal Grant Programs in Support of Interdisciplinary Research: “The Impact of Legal Access on Conditions of Housing Security in Urban India” (Co-PI, with Martha Davis, Northeastern University School of Law) ($50,000 awarded)
| American Sociology Association (Community and Urban Sociology Section; Political Sociology Section; Sociology of Development Section)
RC-21 (Urban and Regional Development) of the International Sociological Association |
Editor, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research https://www.ijurr.org/
Member of the Displacement Research and Action Network http://mitdisplacement.org
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Education
PhD, Sociology
University of Chicago, 2009 -
Contact
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Address
901 Renaissance Park
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 -
Office Hours
By Appointment - see link above
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Dialogues
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