M D Gergan
Biographic Data
| ID | 46180 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M D Gergan |
| GIVEN NAMES | M D |
| FAMILY NAME | Gergan |
| SIGNATURE | GERGAN M D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2132-4752 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 192 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
What is the frontier to the migrating bird? Ladakh, education-driven migration, and the frontier as home
The Universal Meets the Himalayan Particular: Indigeneity, Race, and Decolonization in India
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…
Relations outside of injury: Black ecologies, Indigenous geographies, and repair
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
Imagining Himalayan Glacial Futures: Knowledge Rifts, Disciplinary Debates and Icy Vitalities at the Third Pole
Worry for the fate of Himalayan glaciers is prominent in climate change research, and encounters with glacial retreat shape imaginings of future ruination. Emotions run high when social scientists concerned with the implications of ice sheet collapse are confronted with the views of select glaciologists who downplay the scope of ice melt. At play in the disciplinary disagreements that arise are different orientations to time, and different imagin…
The work of repair: Land, Relation, and Pedagogy
Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural …
Demographic anxieties and Indigenous futures in the Indian Himalaya
Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context
The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, …
Unsettling Race, Nature, and Environment in Geography
What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? In this introduction to the 2023 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers-focused on Race, Nature, and the Environment-we reflect on the meaning and practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis, toxic legacies, uneven development, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that sha…
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…
Disrupting Infrastructures of Colonial Hydro-Modernity: Lepcha and Dakelh Struggles against Temporal and Territorial Displacements
To be Indigenous within the modern nation-state is to live with a profound sense of territorial and temporal displacement. Colonial legal regimes situate indigeneity as a condition of temporal stasis, perpetuating the logic of territorial dispossession and erasure. Drawing on research in India and Canada, we focus on Indigenous experiences to theorize the relationship between colonial legal regimes, territory, temporality, and infrastructure. In …
Theorizing racialization through India’s “Mongolian Fringe”
The “Mongolian Fringe” extending from India’s Northwest Himalayas to the hill regions of the Northeast frontier, was conceptualized by British authorities as a site of geopolitical and racial anxiety given its proximity to China and Southeast Asia. Suspicion and anxiety continue to inform the relationship between the Indian state and its northern frontier territories. Drawing on a collaborative research project with college students from Ladakh i…
Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India
In India and the United States, Lepcha and Diné youth are articulating decolonial futures that diverge from past aspirations. Rather than demanding big infrastructure such as dams or power plants, Indigenous youth forward decolonial visions that reimagine the landscape and energy technologies. In this article, we suggest that Lepcha and Diné activists are articulating a youthful decolonial futurity—a vision for the future where their generation a…
The path you will choose won’t be a fairy tale’: Urban prefiguration and mountain Nostalgia in India’s Northwest Himalayas
Overlaid on a collage of street scenes, college students wrote: ‘Dear rest of India: Just so you know, I am a proud Indian no matter what my language is, how I look, what I wear, and where I am from’. Development narratives encourage parents to send young people from the Himalayas to major Indian cities for education. Students engage in political actions and play with their identity; simultaneously, racialized as ‘foreign’, they work out their re…
Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands
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…
The politics of refusal and opacity in an Urban South
Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands
The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people's response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site o…
The Diaspora Within: Himalayan Youth, Education-Driven Migration, and Future Aspirations in India
Economic change has driven parents across the Indian Himalayan Region to send their children to major Indian cities for higher education. Himalayan students' urban experience and understanding of the nation is profoundly shaped by the movement between the Himalayan context and the foreign experience of Indian city life. We draw on interviews with students to discuss their experiences in the sometimes liberating and sometimes hostile cities of Ind…
Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Spiritual in Post-Humanist and Material Geographies
Materialist and post-humanist scholarship within the discipline has opened up exciting philosophical and theoretical possibilities with which to understand both human and nonhuman worlds. Yet, recent scholarship has been critical of the modern secular tendencies within this approach especially in its lack of engagement with sacred, sentient, and spiritual accounts and experiences. This review draws on perspectives from literary fiction, the subfi…
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…
Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands
The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people's response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site o…
The Diaspora Within: Himalayan Youth, Education-Driven Migration, and Future Aspirations in India
Economic change has driven parents across the Indian Himalayan Region to send their children to major Indian cities for higher education. Himalayan students' urban experience and understanding of the nation is profoundly shaped by the movement between the Himalayan context and the foreign experience of Indian city life. We draw on interviews with students to discuss their experiences in the sometimes liberating and sometimes hostile cities of Ind…
Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India
In India and the United States, Lepcha and Diné youth are articulating decolonial futures that diverge from past aspirations. Rather than demanding big infrastructure such as dams or power plants, Indigenous youth forward decolonial visions that reimagine the landscape and energy technologies. In this article, we suggest that Lepcha and Diné activists are articulating a youthful decolonial futurity—a vision for the future where their generation a…
Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Spiritual in Post-Humanist and Material Geographies
Materialist and post-humanist scholarship within the discipline has opened up exciting philosophical and theoretical possibilities with which to understand both human and nonhuman worlds. Yet, recent scholarship has been critical of the modern secular tendencies within this approach especially in its lack of engagement with sacred, sentient, and spiritual accounts and experiences. This review draws on perspectives from literary fiction, the subfi…
Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands
The work of repair: Land, Relation, and Pedagogy
Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural …
Disrupting Infrastructures of Colonial Hydro-Modernity: Lepcha and Dakelh Struggles against Temporal and Territorial Displacements
To be Indigenous within the modern nation-state is to live with a profound sense of territorial and temporal displacement. Colonial legal regimes situate indigeneity as a condition of temporal stasis, perpetuating the logic of territorial dispossession and erasure. Drawing on research in India and Canada, we focus on Indigenous experiences to theorize the relationship between colonial legal regimes, territory, temporality, and infrastructure. In …
Unsettling Race, Nature, and Environment in Geography
What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? In this introduction to the 2023 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers-focused on Race, Nature, and the Environment-we reflect on the meaning and practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis, toxic legacies, uneven development, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that sha…
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
The path you will choose won’t be a fairy tale’: Urban prefiguration and mountain Nostalgia in India’s Northwest Himalayas
Overlaid on a collage of street scenes, college students wrote: ‘Dear rest of India: Just so you know, I am a proud Indian no matter what my language is, how I look, what I wear, and where I am from’. Development narratives encourage parents to send young people from the Himalayas to major Indian cities for education. Students engage in political actions and play with their identity; simultaneously, racialized as ‘foreign’, they work out their re…
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…
Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context
The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, …
The Universal Meets the Himalayan Particular: Indigeneity, Race, and Decolonization in India
Relations outside of injury: Black ecologies, Indigenous geographies, and repair
Demographic anxieties and Indigenous futures in the Indian Himalaya
The Diaspora Within: Himalayan Youth, Education-Driven Migration, and Future Aspirations in India
Economic change has driven parents across the Indian Himalayan Region to send their children to major Indian cities for higher education. Himalayan students' urban experience and understanding of the nation is profoundly shaped by the movement between the Himalayan context and the foreign experience of Indian city life. We draw on interviews with students to discuss their experiences in the sometimes liberating and sometimes hostile cities of Ind…
Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Spiritual in Post-Humanist and Material Geographies
Materialist and post-humanist scholarship within the discipline has opened up exciting philosophical and theoretical possibilities with which to understand both human and nonhuman worlds. Yet, recent scholarship has been critical of the modern secular tendencies within this approach especially in its lack of engagement with sacred, sentient, and spiritual accounts and experiences. This review draws on perspectives from literary fiction, the subfi…
Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands
The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people's response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site o…
The politics of refusal and opacity in an Urban South
The path you will choose won’t be a fairy tale’: Urban prefiguration and mountain Nostalgia in India’s Northwest Himalayas
Overlaid on a collage of street scenes, college students wrote: ‘Dear rest of India: Just so you know, I am a proud Indian no matter what my language is, how I look, what I wear, and where I am from’. Development narratives encourage parents to send young people from the Himalayas to major Indian cities for education. Students engage in political actions and play with their identity; simultaneously, racialized as ‘foreign’, they work out their re…
Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands
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…
Theorizing racialization through India’s “Mongolian Fringe”
The “Mongolian Fringe” extending from India’s Northwest Himalayas to the hill regions of the Northeast frontier, was conceptualized by British authorities as a site of geopolitical and racial anxiety given its proximity to China and Southeast Asia. Suspicion and anxiety continue to inform the relationship between the Indian state and its northern frontier territories. Drawing on a collaborative research project with college students from Ladakh i…
Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India
In India and the United States, Lepcha and Diné youth are articulating decolonial futures that diverge from past aspirations. Rather than demanding big infrastructure such as dams or power plants, Indigenous youth forward decolonial visions that reimagine the landscape and energy technologies. In this article, we suggest that Lepcha and Diné activists are articulating a youthful decolonial futurity—a vision for the future where their generation a…
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…
Disrupting Infrastructures of Colonial Hydro-Modernity: Lepcha and Dakelh Struggles against Temporal and Territorial Displacements
To be Indigenous within the modern nation-state is to live with a profound sense of territorial and temporal displacement. Colonial legal regimes situate indigeneity as a condition of temporal stasis, perpetuating the logic of territorial dispossession and erasure. Drawing on research in India and Canada, we focus on Indigenous experiences to theorize the relationship between colonial legal regimes, territory, temporality, and infrastructure. In …
Demographic anxieties and Indigenous futures in the Indian Himalaya
Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context
The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, …
Unsettling Race, Nature, and Environment in Geography
What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? In this introduction to the 2023 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers-focused on Race, Nature, and the Environment-we reflect on the meaning and practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis, toxic legacies, uneven development, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that sha…
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…
Relations outside of injury: Black ecologies, Indigenous geographies, and repair
Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics
Imagining Himalayan Glacial Futures: Knowledge Rifts, Disciplinary Debates and Icy Vitalities at the Third Pole
Worry for the fate of Himalayan glaciers is prominent in climate change research, and encounters with glacial retreat shape imaginings of future ruination. Emotions run high when social scientists concerned with the implications of ice sheet collapse are confronted with the views of select glaciologists who downplay the scope of ice melt. At play in the disciplinary disagreements that arise are different orientations to time, and different imagin…
The work of repair: Land, Relation, and Pedagogy
Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural …
The Universal Meets the Himalayan Particular: Indigeneity, Race, and Decolonization in India
What is the frontier to the migrating bird? Ladakh, education-driven migration, and the frontier as home
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Indigenous (9 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (8 works)