About
43
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Introduction
Current institution
Current position
- Professor of Geography & Environment and International Affairs
Additional affiliations
Position
- Professor of Geography and International Affairs
Description
- I am a professor of Geography and International Affairs at the George Washington University who has held administrative roles as Chair of the Department of Geography for six years, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies for 4 years and Associate Provost for Special Programs on the Mount Vernon Campus of the George Washington University for three years.
August 1998 - present
Education
September 1992 - June 1997
Publications
Publications (43)
In this paper we investigate and analyze the elevation of localized practices of migrant belonging, social inclusion and refuge in U.S. cities during the COVID-19 pandemic using the lens of citizenship rights and evolution as proposed by T.H. Marshall. While Marshall's focus was national, we argue that this framework can be adjusted to analyze prac...
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families and displaced individuals. For migrant workers, these disruptions and displacements exacerbated the state-imposed constraints on family formation. But how did high-skilled and high-wage immigrants, presumably immune from these challenges, provide care to and receive care from families during the pandemic? Ba...
In the Americas, the issue of human mobility is increasingly a top priority for local actors. Some places continue to be traditional destinations and have a long history of facilitating the reception and integration of migrants and refugees while others are just starting out on this path. Each has much to offer and, at the same time, much to learn....
En las Américas, cada vez más, la temática de la movilidad humana está presente en la agenda de los actores locales. Algunas localidades continúan siendo destinos tradicionales y tienen larga trayectoria en facilitar la recepción e integración de personas migrantes y refugiadas. Otras, por el contrario, inician un camino en esa tarea. Todas tienen...
In the Americas, the issue of human mobility is increasingly present on the agenda of local actors. Some localities continue to be traditional destinations and have a long history of facilitating the reception and integration of migrants and refugees. Others, on the contrary, are just starting out on this task. All have much to offer and at the sam...
This study examines the intersection of wellbeing and care experienced by first-generation Asian Indian high-skilled immigrants in the USA in spaces varying from the home to the neighborhood, city, and state in sending and receiving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 resulted in new stressors that affected the physical,...
In this paper, I explore precarity as experienced by international students studying in the honours college of a public university in the city–state of Singapore. Precarity for this group emanates from the intersection of their temporary migrant status, the country’s changing immigration and economic development policies and public opinion about in...
In this Special issue, we focus on temporary migrants as an important and often overlooked demographic in urban areas around the world. We demonstrate through empirical evidence that these migrants experience oscillations in precarity over time and that these fluctuations are mediated and better understood through a sensitivity to different scales...
Silting of reservoirs is a ubiquitous process whenever water is impounded. Despite substantial work on the rates of silting, the spatial pattern of silting in reservoirs is not clearly understood. While it is anticipated that the variability of silting increases with decreasing reservoir size, not much is known about siltation in sub‐tropical humid...
This paper analyzes the ethno-national and racial identities adopted by and assigned to 1.5 and 2nd generation African immigrants and the transnational connections of this group using a focus group discussion and 30 semi-structured interviews with full-time undergraduates enrolled at universities in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Belonging was c...
The Singaporean government has employed immigration primarily from China and India to boost the country's working age population and contribute to its economic growth. In this paper I examine the integration of high-skilled migrants from India at the national level and in local urban spaces. I study the role of the state, natives and the immigrants...
Since the 2000s, Ethiopia’s national government has implemented policies to incentivize diaspora investment and engagement in economic and social areas. But ideological and political rifts within the Ethiopian diaspora have resulted in mixed reactions to these policies. The Ethiopian government’s attempt to use an overarching national identity for...
This paper analyzes the relative roles of cultural and structural factors in the emergence and solidification of taxi driving as an ethnic occupational niche among Ethiopian immigrants in the Washington DC metropolitan area within the wider context of globalization and immigrant integration. An ethnic occupational niche is the concentration and spe...
This paper analyzes the expression of identities of first-generation (FG)
immigrants from India in private and public spaces. Focusing on high-skill
upwardly mobile professionals living in the Washington metropolitan
area, the study found that despite “Indian” being a primary
descriptor, these FG immigrants had developed hybrid identities that
incl...
In this afterword to our special issue on immigrant identity and place, we explore the importance of place and context in forming immigrant identity, as well as the various ways in which immigrants make places. Discussions of immigrant adaptations often just consider reception at the national scale, whereas immigrants move into particular cities an...
In this paper, I examine how Hispanic immigrants laid claim to public spaces in the city of Washington, DC and affirmed a sense of belonging to the city and the nation through annual celebrations of a Hispanic festival, La Fiesta DC. Over its 41-year history, the festival has been held in the vastly different spaces of the Hispanic barrio and the s...
This article examines the development of the ‘cultural competition’ as a site for the production of multiple identities by Indian American youths on American college campuses. Through the examination of two categories of folk dance competitions (bhangra and raas-garba) at a private university in Washington, DC, we argue that these competitions appe...
This paper uses investment data for the period 1994–2008 and information from in-depth interviews with key informants in Ethiopian government agencies and 15 entrepreneurs who returned to Ethiopia to start business ventures, to assess the success of the Ethiopian government in attracting diaspora investment. The study found that diaspora investment...
The urban enclave is popularly characterized as an area of strong residential concentration and clustering of an ethnic population. The presence of ethnic businesses such as restaurants and retail stores, as well as services that cater to various other needs of area residents, add to the distinct ethnic feel of these enclaves (Ward, 1968, 1971; Sow...
Historically, for immigrants to the United States, ethnic institutions and organizations provided spaces where customs and traditions were practiced and preserved, and also provided support structures that aided in adjustment to a new setting with unfamiliar cultural mores. Religious ethnic institutions such as churches, mosques and synagogues, sec...
Gated communities, residential enclaves that offer upscale housing and a variety of recreational and communal facilities within a walled area with controlled entrances, are proliferating in many of India's large metropolitan cities. In this paper, we analyze the images of place and identity that are evoked in online advertisements for gated communi...
In this research the concept of mixed embeddedness is used to analyze how economic and political opportunity structures and the group characteristics of Ethiopian and Bolivian immigrants have affected the establishment and development of their businesses in metropolitan Washington, DC. The study relies upon interviews, focus groups, census data, an...
This paper assesses the mutual impact of returning Indian-origin skilled workers on the cities of Bangalore (Bengaluru) and
Hyderabad, which have emerged as India’s leading “tech cities”. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was concern that India was
losing its educated workforce to the West, particularly to the United States through a phenomenon kno...
This article examines the intersection of constructs such as North and South, white and black, rich and poor, male and female in the creation of the diseased Other during the pellagra epidemic in the United States in the early twentieth century. Pellagra was a disease of poverty, caused by poor nutrition and resulting in over 100,000 deaths in the...
This paper presents strategies for actively involving students in studying cultural geography through a research project on youth cultures. It provides a basic framework to investigate selected "sub-cultures" focusing on the origin and diffusion of each culture, its material and non-material aspects and the attributes and meanings of spaces used by...
Social disparity in the spatial distribution of healthcare providers in urban areas is a recognized problem. However, efforts to quantify the problem have been hampered by a lack of satisfactory measurements and methods. We revive and enhance a strategy based on provider density, proposed nearly three decades ago. The method avoids the border-cross...
This paper provides a reflexive account of conducting fieldwork as a graduate student in the Sunderban area of West Bengal state, India, in the mid-1990s. Reflecting on my personal experiences of research in a setting that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I use frames of positionality to understand the impact of explicit and implied power s...
Ethiopians are a recent immigrant group in the United States, having entered the country in significant numbers during the 1980s and 1990s. This preliminary study examines the ethnic and racial identities of children of first-generation Ethiopian immigrants living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The results of twenty in-depth interviews...
This article explores the linkages between women's status and marriage in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Widely known as a progressive region, with high levels of social development despite poor economic growth, Kerala also fares exceptionally well in terms of standard indicators of female position. However, closer scrutiny of prevailing cult...
Immigrants from Ethiopia form the largest community of peoples from Sub–Saharan Africa in the Washington metropolitan area. Like other relatively recent immigrant groups, Ethiopians are dispersed in the region. As residential proximity becomes less common, places that fashion and reflect ethnic community and that provide settings for its continuanc...
There is an epidemic rise in diabetes in the developing world, with ensuing concern about the management and control of the disease. This study investigates the use of complementary therapies to manage Type 2 diabetes in an urban population in Kerala, a state in Southern India. Using ethnographic methods, it shows that the subjects' experiences of...
This paper examines the determinants of contraceptive use among married women in four villages in rural West Bengal, India. It uses primary quantitative data obtained from a survey of 600 women and qualitative data derived from ethnographic methods. Bi- and multi-variate analyses demonstrate that the factors that most influence a woman's use of con...
