Ishan Ashutosh

Pronouns:

He/him

Phone:

(812) 855-6303

Email:

iashutos@indiana.edu

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Department:

Geography

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Research

• Urban Geography
• Political Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Migration/Diaspora
• Postcolonial Studies

Teaching

• G415/515: Advanced Urban Studies/Sustainable Urbanism
• G441/520: Migration and Mobility
• G314: Urban Geography
• G313: Place and Politics
• G380: Cultural Geography
• G388/576: Qualitative Methods in Geography

Biography

Ishan Ashutosh is a human geographer whose research advances two fundamental issues of geography— human mobility and the production of space. Working at the intersection of political, urban, cultural, and historical geographies, Dr. Ashutosh is interested in how the movement of people, ideas, and commodities re-envision and reinforce geopolitical divides. His research focuses on the production of South Asia along two lines of inquiry. The first concerns South Asian diasporas, whose histories and experiences of spatial dispersal and connection reimagine the region through transnational forms of belonging and political solidarities. The second examines social scientific constructions of South Asia, particularly in American geography and its relationship with other social sciences. By looking at how social scientists have constructed South Asia as a region over time, he explores how this vast region was configured by the convergence of scholarship, colonialism, and American foreign policy. Juxtaposing these two readings of South Asia alongside one another— South Asian diasporic understandings of the region alongside social scientific mappings of the region— Dr. Ashutosh’s research exposes the complex geographies through which people invest social and political meanings to place.

Dr. Ashutosh’s research program carves out an interdisciplinary space that synthesizes human geography’s abiding concern with how spaces are made by human activity and the critiques of race and cultural difference launched from postcolonial, Asian American, and migration/diaspora studies. His publications include articles in Racial and Ethnic Studies, Progress in Human Geography, Geography Compass, Diaspora, Journal of Historical Geography, Geographical Review, South Asian Diaspora, and Citizenship Studies.

Publications

• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2019. “Postcolonial Geographies and Colonialism’s Mutations: the geo-graphing of South Asia in the mid-twentieth century,” Geography Compass. e12478 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2019. “The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: Transregions, infrastructure and urbanism.” Progress in Human Geography, p.0309132519868765 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2019. “On the grounds of the global Indian: Tracing the disjunctive spaces between diaspora and the nation-state.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(1), Pgs 41-58. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2018. “Mapping Race and Environment: geography’s entanglements with Aryanism.” Journal of Historical Geography 62 (October), Pgs. 15-23.
• Cook, Ian R. and Ashutosh, Ishan. 2017. “Television drama and the urban diegesis: portraying Albuquerque in Breaking Bad.” Urban Geography, 39(5), Pgs. 746-762.
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2017. “America’s Battle over South Asia.” Tides Magazine. Available from: https://www.saada.org/tides/article/americas-battle-over-south-asia 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2017. “The Geography Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War.”Geographical Review 107.4 (2017): 705-721.
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2015. “Replacing the nation in the age of migration: negotiating South Asian identities in Toronto.” Fennia: International Journal of Geography 193(2): 212-226. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2014. “From the Census to the City: Representing South Asians in Canada and Toronto. Diaspora17(2): 130-148. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2013. “Immigrant Protests in Toronto: diaspora and Sri Lanka’s civil war.” Citizenship Studies 17(2): 197-210. 
• Crane, Nicholas Jon and Ashutosh, Ishan. 2013. “A Movement Returning Home? Critical Geographies of Occupy Wall Street After the Evictions.” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies 13(3): 168-172. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2012. "South Asians in Toronto: geographies of transnationalism, diaspora, and the settling of differences in the city." South Asian Diaspora 4(1): pp. 95-109. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan and Alison Mountz. 2012. “The geopolitics of migrant mobility: tracing state relations through refugee claims and discourses.” Geopolitics 17: pp. 335-354.
• Ashutosh, Ishan and Alison Mountz. 2011. “Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration.” Citizenship Studies, Vol. 15, Nos. 6/7: pp. 21-38. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan and Jamie L. Winders. 2009. “Teaching Orientalism in Introductory Human Geography.” The Professional Geographer. 61: 3, pp. 1-14. 
• Ashutosh, Ishan. 2008. “Recreating the community: South Asian transnationalism in Chicago.” Urban Geography 29: 3, pp. 224-245.