Dr. Malini Sur

Dr. Malini Sur defended her doctoral dissertation entitled Jungle Passports and Metal Fences - Living on the border between Northeast India and Bangladesh at the University of Amsterdam in 2012. Her research interests include the study of partitions, borders and human rights in South Asia, with a focus on the anthropology of violence, political ambiguities and undocumented trade flows. Dr. Sur is the co-editor of Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobility in Asia (with Barak Kalir, University of Amsterdam Press 2012). Photographs from her fieldwork have been exhibited in Kathmandu, Chiang Mai, Amsterdam, Gottingen and Berlin.

 

As a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethnography at UTSC, Dr. Sur will be critically revisiting early post-colonial archives in India, East Pakistan and Bangladesh, and ethnographically documenting people’s experiences of political violence. Investigating military architecture like border outposts and border roads, she argues that these sites not only inscribe violence but also function as spaces of recreation and mobility, complicating civil-military relations. She will use her fellowship period at the Centre for Ethnography to write on these themes.