About the seminar

In this seminar, Professor Aradhana Sharma (Wesleyan University, US) presents a slice of her forthcoming book, which offers an ethnographic meditation on good governance politics in India today. Good governance, Sharma argues, is a technomoral, translocal assemblage. Meaning it is a complex and shifting blend of charged ethical vernaculars about “goodness” and technical expertise about laws and policies, on the one hand, and local imperatives and global standards of neo/liberal governance, on the other.

Although positioned as a counter to populism by the global development industry, good governance, in fact, serves as a fertile ground for populist politics, Professor Sharma argues. She parses the paradoxes and dangers of good governance populism through following Arvind Kejriwal’s style of politics, which combines transparency, anticorruption, and swaraj, and turns on laws and moral invocations to reshape democratic statehood in the name of the ordinary public.

About the lecturer

Aradhana Sharma is a professor of Anthropology at Weslayan University (US). She is a political anthropologist interested in the state, democratic governance, citizenship, social movements, NGOs, gender, and activism. Professor Sharma has conducted extensive fieldwork in India. From women's empowerment programs intended to transform gender relations to transparency and anticorruption legislation that enables people to question the state, Sharma studies the social life, dynamics, and impact of initiatives that seek to "empower" citizens.

Zoom attendance

You can participate in the seminar either in person in Lund or remote, via Zoom. If you like to attend via Zoom, please send an email to our Communications officer to register and get the meeting link: matilda [dot] skoglow [at] svet [dot] lu [dot] se.