Riggs’ research will result in an urban history of post-Partition Delhi told through maps, individual accounts and images of home spaces. This portrait of Delhi’s built landscape history challenges assumptions about the perpetual aid-dependency of refugee communities, the potential effectiveness of public housing and the mutability of national belonging.

Riggs’ book project, “An Archaeology of Refugee Resettlement,” considers events following the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, focusing on how refugees in Delhi, India, have interacted with resettlement homes, dramatically altering and improving them to suit their unique goals and needs. Her research traces how individual household-level actions transformed the city. Rows of identical rudimentary housing units have become celebrated modern neighborhoods of high-value complexes. These material changes served to substantiate refugee communities’ new identities as citizens and enable them to obtain an impressive degree of social acceptance and material success.