The Higher Research Seminar (SASNET – co-sponsor): Glyn Williams, LU Human Geography - "Renegotiating Lockdown: collective life and the control of Covid-19 in India’s low-income urban neighbourhoods"

Abstract:

COVID lockdowns aimed to stop movement and dilute social proximity, and as such were a disruptive moment globally. This was particularly so for low-income neighbourhoods of the Global South, where intense interaction is an essential part of everyday social reproduction. While the resulting tension between disease control and the 'collective life' of these communities is widely recognised, this paper focuses on how it was resolved in practice. How did governments imagine and seek to exercise spatial control in low-income neighbourhoods, and how did these communities respond? It examines the state’s lockdown strategies in three cities (Ahmedabad, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram) focusing on their impact on the cities' working-class communities. The different experiences across our cities and between the neighbourhoods of our study show that lockdowns were both partial and uneven in their effects, and subject to continual change. These differences in turn highlight potential pathways through which forms of emergency intervention more attuned to these communities’ needs could be renegotiated in future.

Glyn Williams

"I was appointed Professor of Development Geography at Lund University in February 2025, after previous academic posts at Keele University (1994-2002), King’s College London (2003-2006), and the University of Sheffield (2006-2025). My research is concerned with making development sensitive to, and inclusive of, the agency and practices of marginalised groups. Its focus is on the ‘everyday governance’ of development: the ideas and motives behind development interventions, the practices of government and other actors engaged in implementing them, and the ways these are reworked and contested on the ground. This work has been empirically grounded in qualitative fieldwork to address three core themes: marginalisation, participation and empowerment; democracy and the reproduction of political authority; and socially just urban transitions. I have primarily worked in India, and from May 2026 will be co-leading a UK-funded research project, From Housing Beneficiaries to Urban Citizens, looking at the effects of state-sponsored rehousing on urban citizenship in China, India, and South Africa."

The Higher Research Seminar is the Department's main collective seminar. The research staff and invited leading national and international scholars present ongoing research and analyses on a broad range of exciting topics relevant to Political Science.

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The Higher Research Seminar | Department of Political Science