Associate Professor Malini Sur

Associate Professor Malini Sur is socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia. Her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was awarded the President’s Book Prize from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia. Her writings centre around mobility – of people, goods, territory, and transport – driven by history, militarisation, globalisation, and environmental change. She critically interrogates the history and socio-politics of borders, infrastructures, transnational flows, and identities. She explores mobility in the context of natural disasters, shifting ecologies, urban air pollution, and climate change. She studies these themes with keen attention to visual representation. Her research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Dutch Research Council (NWO), Ministry of Education Singapore and awards from the Tata Trusts. She was a Chevening scholar and a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University in 2022. 

A/Prof Sur has lectured and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore and worked for Social Science Research Council (New York). She is an Associate Editor of South Asia – Journal of South Asian Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Commoning Ethnography and Humanities Research. In 2021, she was elected to Ordinary Director of the Australian Anthropological Society and has served on the Executive Committee of the South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

Her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) has been reviewed in journals such as Feminist Anthropology, Antipode, Contemporary South Asia, International Migration Review, Journal of Borderland Studies and Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. It has featured in book forums Borderlines-Comparative Studies in South Asia, Middle East and Africa and Contributions to Indian Sociology. She has also published on borderlands in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies. Her work also features in Public Books New York, New Books Network, Conversations in Anthropology and The Polis Project. Photographs from her fieldwork on South Asia's borderlands have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu and Munich.

Her current book project is concerned with the political terrains that degraded air generates in India. Drawing on insights from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, she explores how cargo cyclists and environmental activists in large postcolonial cities experience, navigate and mobilize air in everyday life and the economies, including repair economies that coalesce around urban cycling. She has co-edited two Special Issues in CITY and Economic and Political Weekly on urban anthropology. Her first documentary film Life Cycle about air pollution and urban cycling in India has been screened at the Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Baltimore, Santiago, Singapore, Kolkata and New York.

This information has been contributed by Associate Professor Sur.