Dr Malini Sur
Email: m.sur@westernsydney.edu.au
Dr Malini Sur is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and more recently Australia. She studies agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. She is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University. Malini is the author of Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). She has also published on borderlands in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies. Her second project is concerned with the political terrains that degraded air generates in India. Drawing on insights from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, she explores how daily-wage bicyclists and environmental activists in large postcolonial cities experience, navigate and mobilize air in everyday life and the economies, including repair economies that coalesce around urban cycling. She has co-edited two Special Issues in CITY and Economic and Political Weekly on urban anthropology.
Malini’s interests in the environment, and especially in climatic events, air pollution and dust, and urban mobility now includes new research on Australia. She has published collaborative research on construction sites, on ground-breaking and the redistribution of earth’s particles and on dust and bushfire haze. She has also written about slow cycling and urban mobility in Australia and commented widely in the media including the ABC on the global impacts of dust and pollution. Her first documentary film Life Cycle, about air pollution and urban cycling in India has been screened at Baltimore, Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Santiago, Singapore, Kolkata and New York. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and has held fellowships at the University of Toronto and National University of Singapore.