Biography

Tina Harris received her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2009 from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and is a member of the AISSR Moving Matters research group.

Research Interests

Her main research interests include globalization in Asia and the movement of people and goods across borders, with a particular emphasis on exploring the theoretical connections between cultural anthropology, human geography, and political economy. She has conducted field research in Tibet, Nepal, and India, and has published articles on the marketing and consumption of Tibetan ceremonial scarves, as well as on competing discourses over the reopening of a Sino-Indian mountain pass. She is author of Geographical Diversions: Tibetan Trade, Global Transactions (UGa Press 2013), a book that examines how state power is both articulated and circumvented by cross-border traders in the Himalayas.

Personal Website

• tinaharris.org

• Tina on Twitter

Geographical Diversions

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/geographical_diversions 

Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India. How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and histories of trade are produced. The economic rise of China and India has received attention from the international media, but the effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these nationstates—in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal—have rarely been covered. Geographical Diversions challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs from many theories of macroscale economic change.

Current Research Projects

At the moment, I have three articles ( "From Loom to Machine: Tibetan Aprons and the Configuration of Place;"  "Trading Places: New Economic Geographies of Trade Across Himalayan Borderlands;" "Himalayan Border Crossings: Reopenings and Restrictions") and a full-length book manuscript ( Geographical Diversions) based on my research on contemporary trade and trade routes in Tibet. I am currently working on a brand-new research project that involves mobility, capital, and the production of space between regional airports in Asia.

Networks and Organizations

I am currently the academic coordinator of the Asian Borderlands Research Network (ABRN), which will be co-hosting its 4th international conference in late 2014.

• Asian Borderlands Research Network

• ABRN Facebook Page

Upcoming and Recent Conferences, Invited Lectures, and Invited Workshops

• Invited Keynote Lecture, "Tracing Connections – Explorations of Spaces and Places in Asian Multilocalities", Centre for Development Studies (ZELF), Freie Universität Berlin, 20-21 June, 2013
• "The Mobile and the Material in Sino-Indian Borderlands," American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 14-18, 2012
• "Yak Tails, Rice Cookers, and Changing Corridors in Asian Borderlands" 3rd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network (ABRN), Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Oct 11-13, 2012.
• "Haunting the Border and Flooding the Market: Trade and the Indo-Tibetan Interface," Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) Himalayan Studies Conference, St. Paul,Minnesota, Oct 28-30 2011 
• Workshop on Informality and Borders, Comparative Research on Regional Integration and Social Cohesion Conference, University of Johannesburg, November 30-December 2, 2011 
• "Nature, Capital, and Rule," Symposium on Environment, Society, and Development: Accumulation, Securitization and the Politics of Rule, NUI Galway, August 23, 2011
• "'A Geographical Excuse' and the Lhasa-Kalimpong Trade Route," MIASU Lecture Series, University of Cambridge, March 1, 2011.
• "'Zomia,' the Southeast Asian and Himalayan Massifs: Takes on Highland Transnational Spaces," Asian Borderlands Conference, Chiang Mai, Thailand, Nov 5-7, 2010
• "Cartographic Anxiety: The Lhasa-Kalimpong Trade Route and the Production of Space," for a panel on "The Production of Space: Social and Environmental Change Amidst Development in Tibetan Areas," International Association of Tibetan Studies Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Aug 15-21, 2010
• "Qualitative Research Methods in Anthropology," Ph.D. Seminar in Qualitative Research, Department of Mass Communications, Texas Tech University, April 9, 2010
• "Dispossession, Geographical Blindspots, and the Quest for Coherence in the Indo-Sino-Nepal Borderlands," Panel on Axes of Dispossession: Conflict, Identity, and the Neoliberal Economy in South Asia, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, Dec 2-6, 2009
• Antipode Summer Institute for the Geographies of Justice II, University of Manchester/University of Leeds, May 17-22, 2009
• "Geopolitics and Insecurity II: Encountering Productions of State Security" and "The 2008 Tibetan Uprising: Reflections One Year Later," Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, March 22-27, 2009.

• No ancillary activities