Intimate geopolitics and political geography
A fundamental question driving my research is the intimacy of territory – that is, how our bodily sovereignty, love lives, and care for our friends, communities, and families are geopolitical. My book, Intimate Geopolitics begins with star-crossed lovers whose marriage is destroyed by geopolitical pressures to treat women’s bodies as a religious and national territory. I then take a turn in which young people speak to their complex desires and fears about the future, describing feelings of liberation and alienation in India’s urban centers. I close with the story of a Buddhist woman who chose to marry across religious borders and write her own story in a major Indian newspaper. The book moves from Ladakh to right wing politics in the United States to make a transnational argument about the embodied life and the stakes of territory.
Alongside this ethnographic research, I have developed a comprehensive critical approach to political geography, through an invited contribution to the Wiley “Critical Introductions to Geography” book series. In this book, I have inverted the traditional approach, and begun from the margins or the critiques of the discipline. Rather than shepherd critical approaches to the discipline into separate chapters on, say, “feminist geography,” or “Indigenous geographies,” I have begun from the work of these scholars in each chapter on topics such as “the nation” or “citizenship, and then move back in time to trace the history of the discipline alongside the work of activists, other scholars, and anti-colonial and feminist thinkers.
I have also developed my political geography and intimate geopolitics framework through collaborative writing in innumerable directions, from special issues on “territory, bodies, and borders,” “discomfort feminism,” and “race biopolitics and the future,” to articles such as my co-authored piece on geopolitics in relation to anti-Blackness in the United States with Pavithra Vasudevan (my second PhD student, now at UT Austin). One key contribution from this emerging line of research is our co-authored article, “The Domestic Geopolitics of Racial Capitalism,” in we develop a framework for understanding domestic geopolitics in two senses: domestic in the sense of internal – describing the internal colonization of Black people in Badin, NC and Flint, MI, but also domestic in the sense of home. Finally, I have captured some of these themes in Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures, co-edited with Banu Gökarıksel, and UNC Geography PhD students, Mike Hawkins, and Christopher Neubert.
Temporal Politics, Desirable Futures, and Demographic Fever Dreams
In the last seven years I have developed a body of scholarship on the political uses of demography. This began with “race, biopolitics, and the future,” at AAG and in Environment and Planning D, but has gone on to include several pieces on white and majoritarian nationalism in the US and India, and, more recently, a long term and extensive collaboration through one of the collectives I founded, Desirable Futures.
This work builds on the earlier work with Pavithra Vasudevan and Mabel Gergan, first on how demographic fantasies about the future, and particularly white demographic decline, were mobilized to political ends. Pavithra and I picked up this work again in collaboration with another of my then-PhD students, Mabel Gergan, in an article in EPD for a special issue on “Race and the Anthropocene.” We engage with debates about the start date of the Anthropocene by grappling with the political narratives associated with three specific potential starting dates and connecting them to racialized visions of apocalypse as figured in popular culture. I have continued this work on temporal politics with Andrew Curley: we have given a number of presentations on the “cene scene,” or the politics of naming various iterations of the Anthropocene. Andrew and I argue that the cenes overwrite Indigenous and Black thought by subtly making Europe the hinge point of history, and put forward a more variegated set of possible temporalities. This work is now in revision in two articles, one for Environment and Planning E, and one as part of an invited forum in The Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Leading up to and during the Trump administration I turned my attention to temporality to contemporary US politics, through a series of both peer-reviewed articles and editorials, in collaboration with Banu Gökarıksel, Chris Neubert, Carlos Serrano, and Pavithra Vasudevan, I have written about how right wing nationalism drives contemporary politics through a hyper focus on embodied life. This led to a series of articles and interventions on the Trump campaign, presidency, and feminist reactions to these events. These include a series of three interventions in Political Geography and an article in Gender, Place and Culture. The culmination of this line of research thus far has been an article in Signs, one of the foremost international feminist journals. In, “Demographic Fever Dreams: Fragile Virility and its Population Politics in the Rise of the Global Right,” Banu Gökarıksel, Chris Neubert, and I elaborate on a theory of demographic fever dreams – that is – markedly vivid and lurid fantasies of demographic change that foment support for authoritarianism and right-wing politics. I have also written on related topics in “Baby Bust: Toward Political Demography,” in Progress and Human Geography, withPaul Robbins.
Youth, migration, education, and urban geography
After tenure I embarked on a new line of fieldwork-based research with Himalayan youth who migrate to urban centers in India and abroad for their education. This research has included interviewing young people from Ladakh and from India’s Northeast on their experience of migration – a process that brings them in close contact with racism, anti-tribal bias, and class difference. I have also done two year-long collaborative media projects and art exhibitions, and in 2017, Mabel Gergan and I ran a particularly successful version that culminated with an exhibition and student-made zine. This work was all carried out with my long-term collaborators in Ladakh, the Ladakh Arts and Media Organization. I have also carried out a 300+ household survey with families sending students for education and am working on the analysis now.
I began this research after hearing countless stories of racialized discrimination experienced by Ladakhi students who study outside Ladakh (especially the use of racial slurs typically directed at East Asian people and harassment suggesting Ladakhis are not Indian – being called Chinese or Nepali in the street for instance). My research in this area is the first work on how this racism affects Ladakhi students, and in turn how this experience affects their orientation toward the Indian state and their political strategies for developing Ladakhi autonomy or integration. We think through how these young people prefigure different kinds of futures through the ways they seek to selectively incorporate components of urban life into their embodied comportment and political views, but simultaneously seek to maintain their hometowns as rural spaces. We also engage with urban theory and theories of liminality and temporality to understand how young people view the city as an in-between time and space that then enables them to become liminal and future oriented people.
Methodology, pedagogy, and the academy as a colonized space
A fourth body of work is my writing on research, teaching, and the life of the university and our discipline itself. I have written about intimacy and fieldwork, have collaborated on a series of two articles and a book chapter on how to incorporate decolonizing approaches to research in graduate education, and have participated in a feminist collective documenting UNC’s racialized landscapes. The foundations of this work were laid through collaboration with Osage anthropologist Jean Dennison, now at University of Washington. Jean and I were funded to develop the core course for UNC’s Participatory Research Graduate Certificate, and I went on to teach this course twice, once with Jean and once with Pat Parker. After this, I wrote articles with Pat, Jean, Dorothy Holland and Melvin Jackson.
This work now has a new form, in a long term engagement through the Against Colonial Grounds Collective (ACG) that I founded with Andrew Curley following a piece we co-authored in Dialogues. First with our students and now with colleagues from NYU and UT Austin we have founded a collective that is working to think across the epistemologies provided by Black and Native Studies to create frameworks for understanding the grounds, practices, and theories of our discipline and institutions differently. This work has inspired me to take up a new student-based research project at UNC – the Abolition/Land Back Lab which I cofounded here with my colleague Danielle Purifoy.
Building on this intellectual premise, at UNC, Danielle and I have secured funding for groups of graduate and undergraduate students to do public-facing research with the goal of creating material change. This builds on work I had started in 2015 as a founding member of FLOCK, a feminist geography collective that has published one zine, Ruptures Volume 1 on the racial landscape of UNC. This work is described in a recent ACME piece. I have also, with my then-graduate student, Mike Dimpfl, co-authored an article on the university as a paradoxical site which offers cosmopolitan and global-oriented educational programming while misrecognizing the subaltern cosmopolitanism of its staff and students and sidelining the expansively global visions of its activist students.
Alongside this work, I have written on methodology, collaboration, and intimacy. In a series of four articles, from “Intimacy and angst in the field,” in which I untangle the ethical dilemmas of following the feminist imperative to study intimate life – by suggesting that this work requires specific kinds of care and restraint, to an invited to submit a chapter on cross-cultural research for the latest edition of Meghan Cope and Iain Hay’s Qualitative Research in Human Geography, with Mabel Gergan.