Abstract

This dissertation is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2023) at Access 4 All (A4A), a mid-size domestic development NGO based in Delhi, India, where I was embedded as an unpaid employee on the communications team. Drawing on this long-term participant observation and interviews that I conducted with A4A employees to verify my analyses, I argue that development as an institution produces the very class formations and subject positions it claims to dismantle, and that it does this most visibly not through its effects on beneficiaries but through its effects on practitioners, who must become ever-more "developed" in order to do development work at all. Tracing A4A's reports, its public events, its relationship to caste and Muslim identity, and its e-commerce arm eHandloom, I show how a domestic development organization negotiates to instead become recognized as an international one: through documents that function as simulacra of "good work," events that operate as recognition machines distinguishing developer from developing, and through the resignification of Indian-ness as itself a form of cosmopolitan value rather than a deficit to be overcome. The dissertation closes with a coda, "The Croissant Index," which extends the argument into a phenomenological register: the instantaneous, preconscious recognition of where a place, a person, or oneself sits in a global hierarchy of development. Development, I suggest, is best understood not as a process of improving measurable outcomes but as a process of global class formation and recognition.

Committee Chair

Talia Dan-Cohen

Committee Members

Bret Gustafson; Geoff Childs; Kedron Thomas; Shefali Chandra

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Anthropology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

8-17-2026

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Monday, August 14, 2028

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