Lucy Dubochet is a research associate at the Graduate Institute’s Hirschman Centre on Democracy and postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University’s Wolfson College. Her work’s primary focus is on time and everyday politics in low-income neighbourhoods of Delhi, broadening into questions of citizenship and overlapping vulnerabilities of gender, religion, and regional belonging.
Currently, she is working on a book which discusses logics of domination and subversion that are at play in the long and unpredictable wait for essential services. In a related strand of work, she also explores how the interaction between time and politics plays out during periods of crises. Initially prompted by India’s demonetization, the research interest has since expanded into a project about how the Covid epidemic transformed the rhythm and temporal horizon of life among Delhi’s poor.
Beyond time, she has written on practices of citizenship in a context defined by documentary uncertainty and institutionalized suspicion.
She holds a PhD in development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. Earlier, she led Oxfam India’s research unit, where she pursued research on questions of social policies and inequality.
At Oxfam, she worked with activists and NGOs across India, and she oversaw projects funded by the European Commission and the World Bank. As researcher since, her work has been funded by the Swiss National Foundation for Research and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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