On place, memories, and (im)mobilities

I research primarily questions of sovereignty, territory, ethnicity, power/violence, borders, (im)mobilites, and placemaking. I am interested in understanding how certain populations are rendered powerless through state mechanisms, and in the ways in which the (rendered) powerless navigate, counteract, and resist the dispossession of their bodies, land, and memory in their everyday lives. My research is centered around the question: How is sovereignty realized in the everyday? For this, I ethnographically engage with visual methodologies (photography and film) that create possibilities for different ways of seeing and knowing about being in the world.

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at University of Colorado Boulder. I am currently researching the processes through which Tibetans-in-exile exercise and negotiate political life in Nepal, against the intensification of China’s politics of development and practices of extra-territorial sovereignty (a confluence of geoeconomics and geopolitics).

I have a MA in Geography from Miami University (OH), and a BA in Geography, Tourism, and GIS from St. Cloud State University (MN).

I grew up in Nepal but identify various places around the world as my home. Photographs here are from my immersions in these homes. This virtual space is a platform for my academic/ non-academic work, all of which form a montage of imageries and narratives on (political) human life.