Pavithra Vasudevan
Biographic Data
| ID | 192023 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pavithra Vasudevan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pavithra |
| FAMILY NAME | Vasudevan |
| SIGNATURE | VASUDEVAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Classics in human geography revisited: Laura Pulido’s “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California” ( Annals of the Association of American Geographer…
Love Letters to My Child in These Hate-Filled Times
In a series of three letters, Pavithra describes to their unborn child what it’s like to be pregnant. The first conveys the terror of carrying a new being into a violently homophobic and racist world. The second and third letters recall the desire and beauty that the unborn child sparks in them. In the fourth letter, Pavithra writes to Noor Momo, now six years old, reflecting on the realities of parenting amidst ongoing violence and the uncertain…
Desirable Futures: Write Me a Letter
In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generati…
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
Storytelling Earth and Body
According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural und…
Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization
The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long artic…
An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste
This article focuses on Badin, North Carolina, a segregated aluminum company town established in the early 1900s and site of a current environmental justice struggle. Racialised industrial toxicity operates through quotidian relations of care, corporate and state claims to innocence, and perversion of pleasurable environments. This affective and materialist inventory illustrates how race and waste intertwined in Badin to make aluminum vital and v…
Racial Capitalism Within Public Health—How Occupational Settings Drive Covid-19 Disparities
Epidemiology of the US coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak focuses on individuals’ biology and behaviors, despite centrality of occupational environments in the viral spread. This demonstrates collusion between epidemiology and racial capitalism because it obscures structural influences, absolving industries of responsibility for worker safety. In an empirical example, we analyzed economic implications of race-based metrics widely used i…
The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism
In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of …
Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination
Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the "Great Deluge," the "Nuclear Catacalysm," and "the Population Bomb") and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American p…
Breaking families: Whiteness, state violence, and the alienable rights of kin
Storytelling environmental justice
This chapter focuses on cultural studies approaches to environmental justice activism and research. It brings together theories and methodologies from cultural studies to frame environmental justice as a mode of "storytelling" that performs and communicates what it means to live with environmental injury. Storytelling involves the enactment of "cultural methodologies", which include fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, testimonial, and sci…
Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section
We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movem…
R emembering K earneytown: Race, Place and Collective Memory in Collaborative Filmmaking
This paper reflects on a collaborative project by the co‐authors, investigating how filmmaking may intervene into the racialised politics of place and the practices of memory. Warren County, North Carolina is credited as the birthplace of the US environmental justice movement for 1982 landmark protests linking environmental concerns with civil rights organising. Our 2012 short film, R emembering K earneytown , looks at this significant environmen…
Performance and Proximity: Revisiting environmental justice in Warren County, North Carolina
This paper discusses how performance ethnography has the potential to intervene in research praxis on environmental justice, by combining the analytic, the aesthetic and the activist. Performance enables a politics of proximity that allows research to be accountable to and in dialogue with communities impacted by environmental justice. This paper draws on a case study of a collaborative film project that captures the environmental history of Warr…
Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section
We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movem…
Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination
Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the "Great Deluge," the "Nuclear Catacalysm," and "the Population Bomb") and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American p…
An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste
This article focuses on Badin, North Carolina, a segregated aluminum company town established in the early 1900s and site of a current environmental justice struggle. Racialised industrial toxicity operates through quotidian relations of care, corporate and state claims to innocence, and perversion of pleasurable environments. This affective and materialist inventory illustrates how race and waste intertwined in Badin to make aluminum vital and v…
The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism
In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of …
Storytelling Earth and Body
According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural und…
Breaking families: Whiteness, state violence, and the alienable rights of kin
Performance and Proximity: Revisiting environmental justice in Warren County, North Carolina
This paper discusses how performance ethnography has the potential to intervene in research praxis on environmental justice, by combining the analytic, the aesthetic and the activist. Performance enables a politics of proximity that allows research to be accountable to and in dialogue with communities impacted by environmental justice. This paper draws on a case study of a collaborative film project that captures the environmental history of Warr…
R emembering K earneytown: Race, Place and Collective Memory in Collaborative Filmmaking
This paper reflects on a collaborative project by the co‐authors, investigating how filmmaking may intervene into the racialised politics of place and the practices of memory. Warren County, North Carolina is credited as the birthplace of the US environmental justice movement for 1982 landmark protests linking environmental concerns with civil rights organising. Our 2012 short film, R emembering K earneytown , looks at this significant environmen…
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
Desirable Futures: Write Me a Letter
In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generati…
Performance and Proximity: Revisiting environmental justice in Warren County, North Carolina
This paper discusses how performance ethnography has the potential to intervene in research praxis on environmental justice, by combining the analytic, the aesthetic and the activist. Performance enables a politics of proximity that allows research to be accountable to and in dialogue with communities impacted by environmental justice. This paper draws on a case study of a collaborative film project that captures the environmental history of Warr…
R emembering K earneytown: Race, Place and Collective Memory in Collaborative Filmmaking
This paper reflects on a collaborative project by the co‐authors, investigating how filmmaking may intervene into the racialised politics of place and the practices of memory. Warren County, North Carolina is credited as the birthplace of the US environmental justice movement for 1982 landmark protests linking environmental concerns with civil rights organising. Our 2012 short film, R emembering K earneytown , looks at this significant environmen…
Storytelling environmental justice
This chapter focuses on cultural studies approaches to environmental justice activism and research. It brings together theories and methodologies from cultural studies to frame environmental justice as a mode of "storytelling" that performs and communicates what it means to live with environmental injury. Storytelling involves the enactment of "cultural methodologies", which include fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, testimonial, and sci…
Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section
We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movem…
Breaking families: Whiteness, state violence, and the alienable rights of kin
Racial Capitalism Within Public Health—How Occupational Settings Drive Covid-19 Disparities
Epidemiology of the US coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak focuses on individuals’ biology and behaviors, despite centrality of occupational environments in the viral spread. This demonstrates collusion between epidemiology and racial capitalism because it obscures structural influences, absolving industries of responsibility for worker safety. In an empirical example, we analyzed economic implications of race-based metrics widely used i…
The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism
In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of …
Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination
Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the "Great Deluge," the "Nuclear Catacalysm," and "the Population Bomb") and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American p…
An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste
This article focuses on Badin, North Carolina, a segregated aluminum company town established in the early 1900s and site of a current environmental justice struggle. Racialised industrial toxicity operates through quotidian relations of care, corporate and state claims to innocence, and perversion of pleasurable environments. This affective and materialist inventory illustrates how race and waste intertwined in Badin to make aluminum vital and v…
Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization
The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long artic…
Storytelling Earth and Body
According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural und…
Love Letters to My Child in These Hate-Filled Times
In a series of three letters, Pavithra describes to their unborn child what it’s like to be pregnant. The first conveys the terror of carrying a new being into a violently homophobic and racist world. The second and third letters recall the desire and beauty that the unborn child sparks in them. In the fourth letter, Pavithra writes to Noor Momo, now six years old, reflecting on the realities of parenting amidst ongoing violence and the uncertain…
Desirable Futures: Write Me a Letter
In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generati…
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
Classics in human geography revisited: Laura Pulido’s “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California” ( Annals of the Association of American Geographer…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Art (4 works) · Capitalism (4 works)