Dana Kornberg
Dana Kornberg is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. Trained in South Asian and urban studies, she uses ethnographic and historical methods in order to illuminate the particular ideas and practices that shape processes of urban economic change. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic examination of a case of contemporary urban infrastructure development: the expansion of household garbage services in Delhi, India into neighborhoods where an existing but unofficial garbage collection and scrap recycling workforce dominated. The project asks how the informal system managed to persist, detailing the transactions through which established hierarchies are re-made in practice. Related work has analyzed the racial politics of water infrastructure in metropolitan Detroit.
