Lisa Björkman will discuss her new book Drama of Democracy, which takes an ethnographic approach to questions of political emotion and political trust. Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai, Björkman shows how embodied performance is critical to politicians’ claims to represent constituents, and how Mumbaikars evaluate those performative bids to represent. In Mumbai, Björkman argues, the evaluative criterion of representation is not whether something is image or substance, or even whether politicians are deemed to utter truths or falsehoods. Rather, what matters is whether and how a performance activates and actuates the social relations and political subjectivities that it professes to display.
In highlighting Mumbaikars’ interpretive acumen, Drama of Democracy offers a conceptual toolbox through which contemporary political churnings around the globe might be understood.

Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and urban anthropologist. An Associate Professor at the University of Louisville, she is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Lisa is author of
Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015); Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories, (Columbia University Press, 2020); Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021). Lisa’s new book, Napoli Navigators is forthcoming.

Co-sponsored and generously supported by the following Departments & Programs: Asian Studies, Anthropology, Government & Legal Studies, History, Religion, Sociology, Theater & Dance, Urban Studies and by the Charles F. Adams Lecture Fund