full cv

AREAS OF INTEREST

I am principally interested in the constitution of political community and political subjectivity and the spatial practices that underpin these. I study this principally through two foci: migrants (and refugees) and their citizenship claims, and the enumeration and mapping of land (through cartographic and survey practices). Geographically, the study on migrant and refugee citizenship claims focuses on Hungary, Malaysia and Australia. The study of mapping and survey of land is both contemporary and historical, focusing on contemporary spatial practices of mapping and survey in Iraq and Malaysia and colonial spatial practices in India (particularly rural Bengal) and Malaya. My other research interests include social theory, aesthetic theory, theories and approaches to ethnicity, and aspects of the contemporary war on terrorism.

ONGOING RESEARCH

Enacting European Citizenship (2008-2011) (http://www.enacting-citizenship.eu/)

This is a consortium of researchers funded by the EU Framework 7 Programme to study acts of citizenship in Europe. My colleagues Ayse Caglar, Sebastian Mehling and Zsuzsanna Arendas and I are undertaking a study within the programme called “Acts of Citizenship and the Expansion of the Political” which is about third-country migrant “citizenship acts” that expand or re-scale the borders of political space and political community in Budapest and Berlin.

Colonial Power in the Present (2007 to 2009)
This is a study funded by the CEU research fund to undertake comparative archival research on the constitution of political community and political space in nineteenth century rural Bengal and Kuala Lumpur. The second part of this project is a study of if and how colonial epistemological and methodological techniques of organizing and governing political space and political subjects continue to reverberate in the governance of political community and claims made by migrants in Malaysia and Australia. A third part of the study is on the American mapping of Iraq as a means of constituting, again, political community and a ‘public’ and the terms of their governance.

Living in Surveillance Societies (2009 to 2012)

This is a programme funded by the European Science Foundation COST initiative and is intended to gather together researchers around Europe working on different political, social and economic issues pertaining to the surveillance of societies and groups in Europe.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS (SEE CV FOR A FULL LIST)

Manuscripts and Edited collections

On Colonial Power: Spaces, times and scales of the colonial present, manuscript, in progress.

Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
(co-edited with Carl Grundy-Warr)

Special Issue of Alternatives: Global, Local, Political on “Geography and the Reconceptualization of Politics: Spaces, Times and Scales of ‘the Political’. Volume 31, No. 4, 2006.
(co-edited with Nevzat Soguk)
Special Issue of World Development on “Rethinking Ethnicity and Ethnic Strife: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. Forthcoming, 2009.
(co-edited with Ravi Kanbur and Ashutosh Varshney).

Articles and Chapters

Prem Kumar Rajaram, “On the Material Foundations of Civilizational Thinking”, Geopolitics, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 4.

Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Benevolence and Humiliation: Thinking Migration, Security and Integration in Europe”, in Helen Gilbert and Chris Tiffin (eds.), Burden or Benefit? Imperial Benevolence and its Legacies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Prem Kumar Rajaram, “The limits of decolonisation: the United Nations, the state and the persistence of colonialism at the margins” in Susan Zimmermann and Karin Fischer, Internationalism and the Transformation of Global Inequality :Reform Politics Across Borders, 19th and 20th Centuries, Vienna: VGS and University of Vienna, 2008 (in German).

Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Locating Political Space Through Time: Asylum and Detention in Australia”, in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (eds.) Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, 2007.

Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Dystopic Geographies of Empire”, Alternatives: Global Local Political, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2006.

Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, “Protection or Control: Global Migration Policies and Human Rights”, in Bertrand Fort (ed.), International Migrations and Human Rights: Proceedings of the 6th Informal ASEM Seminar on Human Rights Series, Singapore: Asia-Europe Foundation, 2005.

Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, ‘The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand’. International Migration, Vol. 42, No. 1. 2004.

Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘Making Place: The “Pacific Solution” and Australian Emplacement in the South Pacific and on Refugee Bodies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. 24, No. 3, (2003), pp. 290-306 (special issue on ‘Geography and Post-colonialism’).