Profile
Lucy Dubochet is a research associate at the Graduate Institute’s Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva, and Ambizione Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Bern. Her current research project focuses on young people’s aspirations in urban India. It uses ethnographic methods to explore how aspirations influence everyday practices and how this relation is shaped by gender. Beyond such temporal imagination, she also hopes to shed light on the different meanings and conditions of youth in contemporary urban India.
More broadly, her research focuses on time, gender and everyday politics in India’s urban centres. Her current work on youthful imaginations of the future builds on earlier research focused on the present, particularly on how prolonged waiting reveals gendered relations of power in everyday life.
She holds a PhD in development studies at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s South Asia Research Centre. She has taught courses on the anthropology of youth and on critical approaches to development at the University of Bern and Lausanne. Prior to academia, she founded and led Oxfam India’s research unit and lived in India for many years.
Selected Publications
- 2024. "Waiting and the gendered boundaries of work among India's poor." Economy and Society, DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2024.2315725
- 2023. “Suspicion and Belonging among Migrants from India’s Eastern Borderlands.” In The Price of Belonging in South Asia, edited by Éva Rozália Hölzle and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, 25-43. Leiden: Brill.
- 2023. “Women’s ‘Timepass’: Waiting as Work, Politics and Survival among Delhi’s Poor.” American Ethnologist, 1–11.
- 2022. “Citizenship as Burden of Proof: Voting and Hiding Among Migrants from the Indo-Bangladesh Borderlands”. Citizenship Studies, 27(1): 107-123
- 2019. Worth the While, Time and Politics in an Indian Slum, London School of Economics and Political Science.
- 2014. Thorny Transition: Women’s Empowerment and Freedom from Violence in India, background paper for the World Bank’s ‘Voice and agency: empowering women and girls for shared prosperity’, with Ranjana Das, Sabita Parida, Smriti Singh.
- 2012. Civil Society in a Middle-Income Country: Evolutions and Challenges in India, Journal of International Development 24 (6): 714-727