Baichuan Liu

I am an ESRC funded PhD student in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.

My doctoral thesis, titled 'Geographies of Descent', focuses on the political and cultural geographies of borders, territory and geopolitics at the trans-Himalayan region spanning Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and India. I study the political geographies of mountains and slopes in materialist, elemental, infrstructural and embodied terms, through multi-sited mobile (auto)ethnographic approaches. Specifically, the idea of descent/ascent intrigues me with how elements, bodies and infrastructures move and bounce under an assemblage of geophyiscal forces and the mountainous terrain.

My postgraduate research at Durham concerned the Himalayan borderscapes and I seek to understand the role of development (both large-scale infrastructural schemes and everyday practices) in shaping nationalism, territory and coloniality between Nepal and China. By doing so I focused on Nepalese border residents and their cross-border movements in articulating a particular form of spatial arrangement.

For my undergraduate research, I studied Targeted Poverty Alleviation in Western China in relations to the various conceptualisations of  biopolitics - both as a apparatus of governmentality and as a tool of dispossession. My work won the undergraduate dissertation prize awarded by the RGS Political Geography Group.

Outside the academia, I love backpacking, film photography and skiing :)