Introduction

Dr Jasnea Sarma works on borderlands and resource frontiers in Asia, with a focus on India, China and Myanmar. She is currently a lecturer of Political Geography at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS).

Dr Sarma’s research explores themes of border-lives, migrations and ethnic discourses amidst conflict, resource extraction, land conversion and new connectivity and infrastructures projects across Asia. She is currently working on a book project that builds on a long-term fieldwork in the borderlands of Northern Myanmar (Kachin, Shan, Chin and Rakhine States), Southwest China (Yunnan) and Northeast India (Mizoram and Assam). She has also worked on urban private security and surveillance cultures in Myanmar, as well as the identity, ethnonationalism and citizenship debates in Northeast India.

Dr Sarma’s publications have appeared in several peer-reviewed publications such as International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Journal of Borderlands Studies. She has also published a chapter “Edge of Kaladan: An Ethnographic Exploration of a Road to ‘Nowhere’ on the India-Myanmar Borderlands” in Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean (2021).

Dr Sarma holds a PhD in Comparative Asian Studies from NUS, an MA in East Asian Studies from Delhi University and a BA in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi. She also holds advanced diplomas in Mandarin Chinese Studies from the National Taiwan University and the National Chengchi University in Taipei, Republic of China. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Assamese and Hindi and knows Nagamese, Bengali and Burmese at an intermediate level.

Areas of Interest and Expertise

• Political Geography, Global/Inter-Asian Studies and Asian Languages
• Borderlands, Ethnicity, Identity and Citizenship
• Resource Extraction and Illicit Economies
• Security and Surveillance in Borders and Urban Areas
• Infrastructures and Connectivity (Belt and Road Initiative, ‘Act East’ Policy)
• Feminist Ethnography