I Ashutosh
Biographic Data
| ID | 15563 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I Ashutosh |
| GIVEN NAMES | I |
| FAMILY NAME | Ashutosh |
| SIGNATURE | ASHUTOSH I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2813-4660 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Whose Geography, Whose History? Reimagining How We Teach the History of Geography
In this roundtable, we share our reflections on how to teach more critical histories of geography in Anglo-American institutions. Ashutosh offers a contrapuntal reading of the history of geography, looking for ways to represent both the forces of consolidation and resistance in telling the history of our discipline. Last considers how we might “re-expand” the history of the discipline through the teaching of countergeographies. Sundberg argues th…
Inscribing Ukraine: The symbolic dimensions of Russian reterritorialization through war
Frozen modernity: The US-India ice trade and the cultures of colonialism
This article examines the history of the ice trade between the United States and India that operated from the early-to-mid 19th century. I argue that the ice trade reinforced cultures of colonialism, with its ideas about nature, race, and disease. As a commodity, ice demarcated colonial from colonized space, the tropics from the temperate, and the European from the Indian body. In particular, this article focuses on three central ways in which th…
Rebordering South Asia: Displaced Persons and Urbanization
This article analyzes displacement in the context of three communities in South Asia: Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In each of these cases, refugee management emerges out of the complexities of geopolitics and humanitarianism and becomes central to urban questions of the right to move and remain in the city. Drawing on scholarship in the geopolitics of migrant (im)mobilities, refugee…
The transnational routes of white and Hindu nationalisms
The targeting of social difference by the extreme right is no longer on the fringes of the nation-state. Instead, the far right provides the contours of national community while also dominating the arena of international politics. This paper traces the transnational dialogue that shapes the far right's ideologies by examining the interconnections between Hindu and white nationalisms. I argue that their projects of cultural nationalism are not onl…
Citizens or diasporas in motion? The status of the nation-state, origins, and return in migration studies
Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The geo-graphing of South Asia
This article builds on postcolonial geography's concepts of imaginative geographies, worlding, and subaltern geopolitics by applying them to an examination of South Asia's regional formation in the mid-20th century. Following a review of debates in postcolonial geography, I analyze the mutations of colonialism as they shaped the dynamics of South Asia in the wake of formal decolonization. First, the Indian subcontinent's partition inscribed colon…
The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: Transregions, infrastructure and urbanism
This paper assesses the concept of diaspora with the aim of revitalizing its geographical and spatial complexity. It examines contributions made by geographers and scholars in critical area and racial/ethnic studies. It highlights three spatial formations of diaspora: (1) transregional spaces that challenge state territoriality and the boundaries of national community; (2) the infrastructures that shape diaspora through paths of connection and di…
Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge
This book argues that the international refugee regime and its ‘temporary’ humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in ‘protracted’ conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. S…
On the grounds of the global Indian: Tracing the disjunctive spaces between diaspora and the nation-state
This article assesses the shifting relations between diasporas and nation-states through an ethnography of the affective dimensions contained in the figure of the “global Indian.” This new subject refers to the integration of elite segments of the Indian diaspora for state projects of economic liberalization and Hindu populism. Drawing on fieldwork in Toronto, I argue that the global Indian’s production is rife with contesting claims over the nat…
Mapping race and environment: Geography's entanglements with Aryanism
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is supreme political authority over territory, most commonly associated with the nation‐state. Conventional accounts of sovereignty trace the concept to the Treaty of Westphalia alongside social contract theories of the Enlightenment, which argued for a political order predicated on the obedience of subjects in exchange for the protection of the sovereign. Sovereignty also emerged through the violence and dispossession of colonialism …
Television drama and the urban diegesis: Portraying Albuquerque in Breaking Bad
Albuquerque, New Mexico is the filming location and setting of the popular television drama Breaking Bad (2008–2013). Albuquerque is not merely a passive backdrop to the action in the show but a focal point of the series. So much so that in the geographical imaginations of many, Albuquerque and Breaking Bad have become synonymous with each other. This paper critically examines the representation of urban life within the show. To do this it draws …
The Geography and Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War
Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as th…
From the Census to the City: Representing South Asians in Canada and Toronto
Since the 2006 Canadian Census, "South Asians" have constituted both Canada's and Toronto's most populous "visible minority group." This article investigates the term "South Asian" along two lines of enquiry. First, through an examination of the Canadian Census, this article sheds light on how the state produced the term "South Asian." The second aspect focuses on how this state classification has been used as the basis for antiracist activism an…
Immigrant protests in Toronto: Diaspora and Sri Lanka's civil war
As Sri Lanka's civil war escalated in the spring of 2009, protests led by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto appealed for an immediate ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Held simultaneously in Chennai, London, and Oslo, the protests called for an end to the hostilities in Sri Lanka as well as recognition of the legitimacy of Tamil Eelam, a separate nation state for Tamils i…
South Asians in Toronto: Geographies of transnationalism, diaspora, and the settling of differences in the city
This article examines the formation of South Asian identities through transnational urban networks. Using narratives of South Asians in Toronto from diverse contexts of migration and settlement, I investigate the ways in which the city brings together geographies of South Asian transnationalism and diaspora in the production of identities. In the first section, I examine how connections across urban centers in Toronto, South Asia, and the South A…
The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses
This paper highlights how states attempt to control migrant mobilities through refugee claims. We examine the representations and practices of refugees in the refugee claimant process over time and in very different cases with distinct geopolitical influences and inflections in Canada. Our paper is based on case studies of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Toronto and refugee claimants from Fujian province, China, that landed in British Columbia in 19…
Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration
This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that …
TeachingOrientalismin Introductory Human Geography
This article explores efforts to bring postcolonial theory into the undergraduate human geography classroom. Through a case study of teaching Edward Said's Orientalism in introductory human geography, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial theory to critical pedagogy in geography. We lay out how instructors can teach Orientalism in introductory courses, what happens when they do so, and where efforts to use postcolonial theory to help students …
(RE-)Creating the Community: South Asian Transnationalism on Chicago's Devon Avenue
As one of the largest South Asian business districts in North America, Chicago's Devon Avenue is reproduced through the transnational connections of South Asian migrants. These ties encompass the diaspora as well as the more commonly theorized links between "home" and "host" societies. Based on fieldwork consisting of interviews and participant observation on Devon Avenue, this study considers how Devon Avenue functions as a transnational site, a…
Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions . Aprodicio A. Laquian ; The World in a City . Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier, eds
(2005). Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions. Aprodicio A. Laquian; The World in a City. Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier, eds.. Urban Geography: Vol. 26, No. 8, pp. 746-749
Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration
This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that …
The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses
This paper highlights how states attempt to control migrant mobilities through refugee claims. We examine the representations and practices of refugees in the refugee claimant process over time and in very different cases with distinct geopolitical influences and inflections in Canada. Our paper is based on case studies of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Toronto and refugee claimants from Fujian province, China, that landed in British Columbia in 19…
The transnational routes of white and Hindu nationalisms
The targeting of social difference by the extreme right is no longer on the fringes of the nation-state. Instead, the far right provides the contours of national community while also dominating the arena of international politics. This paper traces the transnational dialogue that shapes the far right's ideologies by examining the interconnections between Hindu and white nationalisms. I argue that their projects of cultural nationalism are not onl…
The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: Transregions, infrastructure and urbanism
This paper assesses the concept of diaspora with the aim of revitalizing its geographical and spatial complexity. It examines contributions made by geographers and scholars in critical area and racial/ethnic studies. It highlights three spatial formations of diaspora: (1) transregional spaces that challenge state territoriality and the boundaries of national community; (2) the infrastructures that shape diaspora through paths of connection and di…
Immigrant protests in Toronto: Diaspora and Sri Lanka's civil war
As Sri Lanka's civil war escalated in the spring of 2009, protests led by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto appealed for an immediate ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Held simultaneously in Chennai, London, and Oslo, the protests called for an end to the hostilities in Sri Lanka as well as recognition of the legitimacy of Tamil Eelam, a separate nation state for Tamils i…
Mapping race and environment: Geography's entanglements with Aryanism
The Geography and Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War
Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as th…
TeachingOrientalismin Introductory Human Geography
This article explores efforts to bring postcolonial theory into the undergraduate human geography classroom. Through a case study of teaching Edward Said's Orientalism in introductory human geography, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial theory to critical pedagogy in geography. We lay out how instructors can teach Orientalism in introductory courses, what happens when they do so, and where efforts to use postcolonial theory to help students …
(RE-)Creating the Community: South Asian Transnationalism on Chicago's Devon Avenue
As one of the largest South Asian business districts in North America, Chicago's Devon Avenue is reproduced through the transnational connections of South Asian migrants. These ties encompass the diaspora as well as the more commonly theorized links between "home" and "host" societies. Based on fieldwork consisting of interviews and participant observation on Devon Avenue, this study considers how Devon Avenue functions as a transnational site, a…
Rebordering South Asia: Displaced Persons and Urbanization
This article analyzes displacement in the context of three communities in South Asia: Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In each of these cases, refugee management emerges out of the complexities of geopolitics and humanitarianism and becomes central to urban questions of the right to move and remain in the city. Drawing on scholarship in the geopolitics of migrant (im)mobilities, refugee…
Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge
This book argues that the international refugee regime and its ‘temporary’ humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in ‘protracted’ conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. S…
Inscribing Ukraine: The symbolic dimensions of Russian reterritorialization through war
Frozen modernity: The US-India ice trade and the cultures of colonialism
This article examines the history of the ice trade between the United States and India that operated from the early-to-mid 19th century. I argue that the ice trade reinforced cultures of colonialism, with its ideas about nature, race, and disease. As a commodity, ice demarcated colonial from colonized space, the tropics from the temperate, and the European from the Indian body. In particular, this article focuses on three central ways in which th…
From the Census to the City: Representing South Asians in Canada and Toronto
Since the 2006 Canadian Census, "South Asians" have constituted both Canada's and Toronto's most populous "visible minority group." This article investigates the term "South Asian" along two lines of enquiry. First, through an examination of the Canadian Census, this article sheds light on how the state produced the term "South Asian." The second aspect focuses on how this state classification has been used as the basis for antiracist activism an…
Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions . Aprodicio A. Laquian ; The World in a City . Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier, eds
(2005). Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions. Aprodicio A. Laquian; The World in a City. Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier, eds.. Urban Geography: Vol. 26, No. 8, pp. 746-749
(RE-)Creating the Community: South Asian Transnationalism on Chicago's Devon Avenue
As one of the largest South Asian business districts in North America, Chicago's Devon Avenue is reproduced through the transnational connections of South Asian migrants. These ties encompass the diaspora as well as the more commonly theorized links between "home" and "host" societies. Based on fieldwork consisting of interviews and participant observation on Devon Avenue, this study considers how Devon Avenue functions as a transnational site, a…
TeachingOrientalismin Introductory Human Geography
This article explores efforts to bring postcolonial theory into the undergraduate human geography classroom. Through a case study of teaching Edward Said's Orientalism in introductory human geography, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial theory to critical pedagogy in geography. We lay out how instructors can teach Orientalism in introductory courses, what happens when they do so, and where efforts to use postcolonial theory to help students …
Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration
This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that …
South Asians in Toronto: Geographies of transnationalism, diaspora, and the settling of differences in the city
This article examines the formation of South Asian identities through transnational urban networks. Using narratives of South Asians in Toronto from diverse contexts of migration and settlement, I investigate the ways in which the city brings together geographies of South Asian transnationalism and diaspora in the production of identities. In the first section, I examine how connections across urban centers in Toronto, South Asia, and the South A…
The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses
This paper highlights how states attempt to control migrant mobilities through refugee claims. We examine the representations and practices of refugees in the refugee claimant process over time and in very different cases with distinct geopolitical influences and inflections in Canada. Our paper is based on case studies of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Toronto and refugee claimants from Fujian province, China, that landed in British Columbia in 19…
Immigrant protests in Toronto: Diaspora and Sri Lanka's civil war
As Sri Lanka's civil war escalated in the spring of 2009, protests led by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto appealed for an immediate ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Held simultaneously in Chennai, London, and Oslo, the protests called for an end to the hostilities in Sri Lanka as well as recognition of the legitimacy of Tamil Eelam, a separate nation state for Tamils i…
From the Census to the City: Representing South Asians in Canada and Toronto
Since the 2006 Canadian Census, "South Asians" have constituted both Canada's and Toronto's most populous "visible minority group." This article investigates the term "South Asian" along two lines of enquiry. First, through an examination of the Canadian Census, this article sheds light on how the state produced the term "South Asian." The second aspect focuses on how this state classification has been used as the basis for antiracist activism an…
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is supreme political authority over territory, most commonly associated with the nation‐state. Conventional accounts of sovereignty trace the concept to the Treaty of Westphalia alongside social contract theories of the Enlightenment, which argued for a political order predicated on the obedience of subjects in exchange for the protection of the sovereign. Sovereignty also emerged through the violence and dispossession of colonialism …
Television drama and the urban diegesis: Portraying Albuquerque in Breaking Bad
Albuquerque, New Mexico is the filming location and setting of the popular television drama Breaking Bad (2008–2013). Albuquerque is not merely a passive backdrop to the action in the show but a focal point of the series. So much so that in the geographical imaginations of many, Albuquerque and Breaking Bad have become synonymous with each other. This paper critically examines the representation of urban life within the show. To do this it draws …
The Geography and Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War
Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as th…
Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge
This book argues that the international refugee regime and its ‘temporary’ humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in ‘protracted’ conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. S…
On the grounds of the global Indian: Tracing the disjunctive spaces between diaspora and the nation-state
This article assesses the shifting relations between diasporas and nation-states through an ethnography of the affective dimensions contained in the figure of the “global Indian.” This new subject refers to the integration of elite segments of the Indian diaspora for state projects of economic liberalization and Hindu populism. Drawing on fieldwork in Toronto, I argue that the global Indian’s production is rife with contesting claims over the nat…
Mapping race and environment: Geography's entanglements with Aryanism
The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: Transregions, infrastructure and urbanism
This paper assesses the concept of diaspora with the aim of revitalizing its geographical and spatial complexity. It examines contributions made by geographers and scholars in critical area and racial/ethnic studies. It highlights three spatial formations of diaspora: (1) transregional spaces that challenge state territoriality and the boundaries of national community; (2) the infrastructures that shape diaspora through paths of connection and di…
Citizens or diasporas in motion? The status of the nation-state, origins, and return in migration studies
Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The geo-graphing of South Asia
This article builds on postcolonial geography's concepts of imaginative geographies, worlding, and subaltern geopolitics by applying them to an examination of South Asia's regional formation in the mid-20th century. Following a review of debates in postcolonial geography, I analyze the mutations of colonialism as they shaped the dynamics of South Asia in the wake of formal decolonization. First, the Indian subcontinent's partition inscribed colon…
Rebordering South Asia: Displaced Persons and Urbanization
This article analyzes displacement in the context of three communities in South Asia: Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In each of these cases, refugee management emerges out of the complexities of geopolitics and humanitarianism and becomes central to urban questions of the right to move and remain in the city. Drawing on scholarship in the geopolitics of migrant (im)mobilities, refugee…
The transnational routes of white and Hindu nationalisms
The targeting of social difference by the extreme right is no longer on the fringes of the nation-state. Instead, the far right provides the contours of national community while also dominating the arena of international politics. This paper traces the transnational dialogue that shapes the far right's ideologies by examining the interconnections between Hindu and white nationalisms. I argue that their projects of cultural nationalism are not onl…
Frozen modernity: The US-India ice trade and the cultures of colonialism
This article examines the history of the ice trade between the United States and India that operated from the early-to-mid 19th century. I argue that the ice trade reinforced cultures of colonialism, with its ideas about nature, race, and disease. As a commodity, ice demarcated colonial from colonized space, the tropics from the temperate, and the European from the Indian body. In particular, this article focuses on three central ways in which th…
Inscribing Ukraine: The symbolic dimensions of Russian reterritorialization through war
Whose Geography, Whose History? Reimagining How We Teach the History of Geography
In this roundtable, we share our reflections on how to teach more critical histories of geography in Anglo-American institutions. Ashutosh offers a contrapuntal reading of the history of geography, looking for ways to represent both the forces of consolidation and resistance in telling the history of our discipline. Last considers how we might “re-expand” the history of the discipline through the teaching of countergeographies. Sundberg argues th…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (9 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Law (8 works)