Andrew Grant

Critical Geographies of Urbanization and Asian Geopolitics

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Andrew Grant, PhD
Geographer, Educator, and Social Scientist

Welcome to my website. I am Andrew Grant, a human geographer whose research focuses on political geographies of development and humanistic social science. I am currently Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Tampa. I hold a PhD in geography from UCLA and have taught at UCLA, University of Colorado, and Boston College.

My research and teaching emphasize how development – of cities, border sites, and energies – affects people and landscapes in global margins, often as a result of larger geopolitical shifts. My studies include the urban geopolitics of rural-to-urban migration amid state-led urbanization drives on the Tibetan Plateau, complications between soft power and security at China’s Inner Asian borders, and the geopolitics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative cartography. My research is grounded in qualitative methods including ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis.

Please look around and explore my current and future research plans, publications, teaching experience, and CV.

The Concrete Plateau

My 2022 book The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine, published with Cornell University Press, examines the experiences of Tibetan rural to urban migrants under conditions of state-led urbanization in 21st century China. Focusing on the city of Xining, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, I argue that China’s national urbanization project is becoming entangled with Tibetans' place-making projects, leading Tibetans to produce an urban modernity that differs from the hegemonic Chinese urbanism that is increasingly taking root in Western China. This subaltern urbanism sits uncomfortably within a Han Chinese urban hegemony that leaves little place for un-regulated ethnicity. The study contributes to research on politics and urbanization, proposing that subaltern urbanization can challenge state-led "civilizing machines" through place-making practices that use places, memories, and animals, as well as critiques of social policy and aesthetic practice.

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Watch a Book Talk on Concrete Plateau

Book talk at UC Berkeley in 2023

Award Winner


Weatherhead East Asia Institute First Book Award
AAG-PGSG Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award

Buy the Book

-> Bookshop.org
-> Amazon.com
-> Cornell University Press


Curriculum Vitae

Download CV

Google Scholar
Research Profile

Publications

Teaching Philosophy
and Courses

Teaching

Scholarly Articles

Read about my work
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Crossing Khorgos: Soft power, security, and suspect loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh boundary

I argue that the BRI in northwest China fuses soft power rhetoric with territorial security practices in a way that is proving to be counter-productive. It risks undoing the people-to-people work of the BRI. Read more..

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Channeling Xining: Tibetan Place-Making in Western China during the Era of Commodity Housing

Through an analysis of Tibetan place-making in China's Xining City, I argue that a focus on channeling in place-making provides a way to move beyond typical accounts of resistance and domination in urban spaces. Read more..

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China’s double body: infrastructure routes and the mapping of China’s nation-state and civilization-state

There is a tension at the heart of contemporary Chinese cartography: maps of China's civilization-state and nation-state reveal imaginations of a China that is paradoxically bordered and open to connection. Read more..

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Closing the sub-frontier: corridorising Tibet and the social life of pervasive security

This article draws from sinophone scholarly article and ethnography on the Tibetan Plateau to show how corridor development has been conceived as a positive space to eliminate the "frontier" where non-Han people maneuver. Read more..

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Northeast Asia in Regional Context

Introduction to our special issue, with Alex Diener and Mia Bennett, on Northeast Asia's "regional betweenness": its liminal position between other world regions in terms of economic, geopolitical, infrastructural, and logistical configurations, as well as its analytic purchase. Read more..

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Urbanization, relational space, and practicing Muslim ethnicity in Western China

This article reveals the complex social values and community practices that shape Muslim life in a city in contemporary China. I show the importance of navigating relative and relational spaces in the domestic and religious spheres. Read more..

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Navigating macro and micro across urban assemblages

My response to an author-meets-critics session on my book The Concrete Plateau in Dialogues in Human Geography. I argue for the importance of grounding assemblage theory through ethnographic community engagement. Read more..


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Hyperbuilding the civilized city: ethnicity and marginalization in Eastern Tibet

 This paper argues that urban hyperbuilding produces not only new spaces for state and market power but also puts economic and social pressure on already marginalized ethnic minorities. Read more..

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