Research Interests
I am a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. In my research, I seek to understand how political and geopolitical conflict is constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth.
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Intimate Geopolitics Since 2004, my research has engaged with the politics of marriage and fertility in Ladakh’s Leh District. As residents of Jammu and Kashmir State, Ladakhis have experienced the politicization of religious identity over the course of the twentieth century as the colonial logics linking population and territory unfolded during and after partition. Ladakhis struggle to make their political demands heard in the context of geopolitical conflict and territorial uncertainty. Since the 1980s, increasing tension between Leh’s Buddhist majority and its Shia and Sunni minorities has entangled decisions about marriage and babies in disciplinary political narratives. This research explores the territorial logic manifest in a pro-natal campaign and a ban on religious intermarriage, as well as the ways that people cope with such territorial logic. My research has included survey work and interviews, as well as oral history and photography projects with Ladakhi youth. The research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the Social Science Research Council, and the Society of Women Geographers. |
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Project Publications
2012 Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Early version online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045608.2012.660391
2011 “She says herself, ‘I have no future’”: Love, fate, and territory in Leh District, India. Gender, Place and Culture 18(4): 455-476.
2009 The domestication of geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim conflict and the policing of marriage and the body in Ladakh, India. Geopolitics 14(2): 1-22.
2008 Notes from the field: the geopolitics of intimacy and babies in Leh. Ladakh Studies 23(December): 20-25.
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Courses Taught
Geography 267: South Asia (Fall 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012)
Geography 703: Research Design (Fall 2010, Spring 2012)
Geography 814: Seminar in Social Geography, "Bodies, Territory, Violence." (Spring 2011)
Geography 399: Special Topics, Political and Cultural Geographies of South Asia (Spring 2010)
Geography 120: World Regional Geography (Fall 2009, Spring 2010)
