Welcome to my website. I am a Research Council of Finland postdoctoral researcher based in the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF). My current project, funded by the Research Council of Finland (2022-2025), explores whether, why, and how the state creates a situation where refugees and asylum seekers are kept indeterminately waiting. In so doing, it is geographically focused on the Rohingya refugees in the camps of Bangladesh and the asylum seekers residing in different reception centers in Finland. I am the author of Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border, Cambridge University Press. 

 

At the Institute, my works directly engage with the university's strategic program that focuses specifically on the profiling area of  “cultural encounters, mobilities and borders.” As such, I work independently and in close collaboration with colleagues on and around the issues of politics of categories in relation to borders. In recognition of my contribution to the field, I have been awarded the 2023 Stanley D. Brunn Junior Scholar Award by the Political Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). 

 

Broadly, I am interested in exploring the way man-made ideas of borders and bounded spaces affect human mobility and vice versa. As such, I specialize in the study of state, territory, borders, sovereignty, (non)citizenship, and migration. At the same time, I often remain critical regarding “importing” ready-made ideas from the Global North to the Global South in terms of both theory and methods. My scholarship thus sits at the intersection of political geography, critical geopolitics, decolonial praxis, and qualitative research methods.

 

Before taking up my current position at the Karelian Institute, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Geography at the University of Oulu, Finland. I explored the way regional changes and transformation processes take place in Arctic Finland and its adjacent regions due to state and supra-state organizations.   ​​

 

I currently teach undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Eastern Finland. Earlier, I taught face-to-face and online classes at UH Mānoa and the University of Dhaka as a Lecturer. I am open to supervising students.

 

My PhD is in Geography from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA. I was awarded the prestigious East-West Center Graduate Degree Fellowship to pursue my doctoral studies. I studied the choice of citizenship, experiences of (non)citizenship, and state-making processes in the former Bangladesh-India border enclaves in my dissertation research.