I am an Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies and the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where I am also a member of the David Lam Center. I am a member of Aruna Global South, a research collective for emerging scholars and thinkers from, and/or have ties to, the Asian Global South, and who have been systematically marginalized in the spaces of knowledge production.I completed a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, an MA in Geography from Miami University, and a BA with honors in Geography, Tourism, and GIS from St. Cloud State University. I have previously taught at Macalester College, Eckerd College, and the University of Colorado Boulder. I grew up in the city of Patan, Nepal, or as a child I thought the city grew around me — learning and relearning from the people that laboured in it and the alleys old and new in which they traversed. Before engaging with social theory, I learned from the social life worlds of the city and my villages - on how identity is constitutive of coexistence yet something that already always conditions exclusion. Outside of South Asia, my life journeys — in a white central Minnesotan town, Latino Pilsen in Chicago, and Pan-Asian Flushing/Jackson Heights in Queens, NY — have taught me that social and political life is always more-than-textual. I take these experiences to heart in participating in ethnographic research as a visual geographer.I research primarily questions of sovereignty, territory, ethnicity, power/violence, borders, (im)mobilites, and placemaking. I am interested in understanding how certain populations are rendered powerless through state mechanisms, and in the ways in which the (rendered) powerless navigate, counteract, and resist the dispossession of their bodies, land, and memory in their everyday lives. My research is centered around the question: How is sovereignty realized in the everyday? For this, I ethnographically engage with visual methodologies (photography and film) that create possibilities for different ways of seeing and knowing about being in the world.