Critical Geographies of Urbanization and Asian Geopolitics
Thank you for visiting the website of Andrew Grant. I am a political geographer who studies belonging and exclusion in global borderlands. I have teaching experience in geography and international studies. I hold a PhD in geography from UCLA.
Starting in 2023, I am Assistant Professor of Geography at University of Tampa.
Broadly, my research contributes to discussions about the role of urbanization, borders, and other materials in global geopolitics and the politics of marginalized groups. 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: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine 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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Weatherhead East Asia Institute First Book Award AAG-PGSG Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award
This new special issue, co-edited with Alex Diener and Mia Bennett, contains four original contributions from scholars that grapple with Northeast Asia's "regional betweenness" - its liminal position between other world regions. They offer new perspectives on the composition of the region amidst shifting economic, geopolitical, infrastructural, and logistical configurations, as well as its analytic purchase as a world region.
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.
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.
Paying close attention to geopolitical discourses and cartographies of borders, railways, and roads reveals that maps of China's civilization-state and nation-state are not reducible to one another.
Through a study of urban sites that ring Qinghai Lake, the world's largest high-altitude salt lake, this project examines how seasonally fluid urbanization is transforming the Tibetan Plateau. Building on research on governance and ecological construction in pastoralist resettlements and the development of coastal Chinese eco-cities, I am investigating how urbanization in the mode of “ecological civilization,” or 生态文明, works to homogenize difference by importing inner Chinese-developed best practices for environmental stewardship and green urban design at the expense of indigenous practices. This is not a one-way process, however; my work will highlight Tibetans’ strategies to modify and “green” their urban milieus using their own environmental practices.
This research brings together cities in two states that have invested in campaigns to re-create their peripheries as urban zones. India’s “Smart City” and China’s “Civilized City” programs, working with private developers, are increasingly using urbanization to attempt to homogenize their Inner Asian borderlands. This project explores how flexible urbanism is a mobile model adaptable to topographically difficult terrain, but which is ultimately dependent on state-led developmentalist goals. The concept of geopolitical urbanization captures not only processes of state politics and urban development, but also ongoing processes of racialization, surveillance, and disempowerment that affect borderlands peoples.
Infrastructure is an increasingly important part of the political aesthetics of mapped space.
This project explores how communities of sense gather around the technical aesthetics of cartographic and infrastructural portrayal. Today, boundaries and borderlands are being illustrated and geopolitically mobilized as aesthetic and technical practices. Remote sensing and satellite imagery, in combination with interpretation, are used to tell publics about what is happening in relation to moving boundaries, road development, and detention camps.
This infrastructure-fare is a form not only of political disagreement, but also generates a shared public and diplomatic culture about what counts as visible and what remains invisible. What is deemed visible has ethical implications for human rights.
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