24/12/2025
📚 Meet the Author!
Join us for a discussion on "The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi" with Asst. Prof. Dr. Sanjeev Routray from The Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam.
📅 Date: Friday, 9 January 2026
🕐 Time: 1:00 - 3:00 PM
📍 Venue: Executive Meeting Room, 2nd Floor, RILCA, Mahidol University, Salaya Campus
All are welcome!
🔗Learn more about the book: https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/right-be-counted
Abstract:
The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and citizenship entitlements in the city. The book illustrates how the quest for documenting the numerical presence and visibility of the poor is linked to tactics and countertactics, including the mediated politics of the intermediaries, documentary and inscriptive struggles to prove existence and authenticity, legal battles to contest state categorization and classification, and numerous cultural idioms and resistance strategies. Analyzing social, political, and economic relationships alike, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi. Along with analyzing the fraught process of calculative governmentality and an array of political idioms, the book also offers a bottom-up perspective on how the politics of the poor intersects with spatial arrangements, social cleavages, and activists in the city.
Bio:
Dr. Sanjeev Routray is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He completed his PhD in sociology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Routray is a sociologist-anthropologist, critical urbanist, and migration specialist with a focus on South Asia and beyond. His areas of expertise include urban poverty, political and legal mobilizations, transregional migration, and caste and labor market negotiations. He is the author of The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (2022, Stanford University Press), and his articles have appeared in leading journals, including International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, and City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, and Action. Dr. Routray has received fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation (UK), the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (UK), the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation (Germany), the International Development Research Centre (Canada), and the Hari Sharma Foundation for his research and writing.
