Skip to main content
School of Geography

Dr Niranjana R

Niranjana

Lecturer

Email: n.ramesh@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Geography Building, Room 202
Website: https://kadarkarai.net/
Twitter: @niranjwrite

Profile

I’m a human geographer interested in urban natural environments and what they have to do with sociality, alterity and politics in cities, primarily in the global South. Building on experience as a journalist reporting on urban development and culture in south India, my work has long been rooted in ethnographic engagement with the everyday life of cities.

My PhD thesis (UCL, 2018) titled ‘Infrastructures with a pinch of salt: comparative technopolitics of desalination in Chennai, India and London, UK’ critically engages with the role of engineers, water managers and state actors in shaping urban waterscapes.

In 2018-19, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in an ERC-funded project titled ‘Rethinking Urban Nature’ at the University of Cambridge, focusing on Chennai’s wetland geographies and the social movements emerging around them.

My current research project is on Chennai’s coastal ecologies, attending in particular to issues of caste, labour and environmental justice in this material geography. Titled ‘Coastal city: materialising subaltern geographies at the urban margins’, the Leverhulme Trust funded project will culminate in a book that centres the coastal and the oceanic/sea in writing the city.

Back to top