Doctor Malini Sur

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia. My research explores agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. A first line of inquiry is concerned with infrastructures, transnational flows, and citizenship. The second explores the relationship that degraded air and mobility has to urban space. I also investigate the afterlives of natural disasters, shifting ecologies, air pollution, and climate change in Asia and Australia. I position these themes historically and in productive dialogue with human rights discourses, along with keen attention to visual representation. 

My book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borderlands. Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants", "savage mountaineers" and Christian "ethnic minorities" suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors.In Jungle Passports, I follow their struggles to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. I show how the partitioning of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. I have also published on borderlands  in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies. Photographs from my fieldwork on South Asia's borders have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu and Munich. 

My second ethnographic project studies the political terrains that degraded air generates in India. Drawing on insights from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I explore how daily-wage bicyclists 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. I have co-edited two Special Issues in CITY and Economic and Political Weekly on these themes. My first documentary film Life Cycle, about air pollution and urban cycling in India has been screened at the Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Santiago, Singapore, Kolkata and New York. My interest in the environment, and especially in climatic events, air pollution and dust, and urban mobility now extends to my new research in Australia. I have published collaborative research on construction sites, on ground-breaking and the redistribution of earth’s particles and on dust and bushfire haze. I have written about slow cycling and urban mobility in Australia and commented widely in the media including the ABC on the global impacts of dust and pollution. My public writing has appeared in the Conversation, Himal, The Telegraph, Wire and Scroll.

At Western Sydney University, I divide my time between the School of Social Sciences where I am a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the Institute for Culture and Society where I serve as the Deputy Director of Engagement and International.

This information has been contributed by Doctor Sur.