Sophia Abbas

Sophia Abbas is a Ph.D. candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology whose dissertation is an ethnographic study of land disputes and the urban land planning Bureaucracy in the National Capital Region of India. Amidst emerging master plans, real estate activity, logics of economy and party politics, these villages have undergone massive land acquisition for urban development. As the value of land rapidly shifts on this urban periphery,  her project focuses on how different actors dispute questions of rights and access to land across various scales of the urban planning bureaucracy, master plans, courtrooms and their everyday lives as well as the aspirations and anxieties they articulate about urban futures. In all of this the question of who belongs and who gets excluded from state visions, urban life, land and law are critical concerns of her project. Sophia’s broader areas of interest and expertise include urban studies, political geography, agrarian studies, the Anthropology of  planning and the Anthropology of Aspirations. Her previous degrees prior to joining the Ph.D. program at Yale include a masters and an M.Phil. in Sociology from the Sociology department at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.