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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 the lives lived around waterways. Building on experience as a journalist reporting on urban development and culture in south India, my work in rooted in ethnographic engagement with the everyday life of cities and the politics of alterity it often points to.

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.

From 2019-22, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the London School of Economics & Political Science, focusing on Chennai’s coastal ecologies, attending in particular to issues of caste, labour and environmental justice in this material geography. I’m currently preparing a monograph drawing primarily on research from this project. 

In 2025-26, I’ll be based at the French Institute of Pondicherry, on a Leverhulme International Fellowship.

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