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Maan Barua

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Future Flourishing

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About

Maan Barua works on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. His research generates novel syntheses between posthumanism, postcolonialism and political economy, and draws on methods that are ethnographic, visual and which cut across natural and social science divides. His empirical scholarship is focused on four thematic areas: urbanization, plantations and agrarian transitions, biocapital and metabolism. Maan is currently working on a book on urban wetlands, provisionally titled “An Amphibious Urbanism”. He is the author of Lively Cities: reconfiguring urban ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Plantation Worlds (Duke University Press, 2024). He is the PI on an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant Urban Ecologies: governing nonhuman life in global cities, and is the recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2022). Maan is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Awards

  • Philip Leverhulme Prize, 2022

Relevant Publications

  • Barua, M. (2024). Plantation Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
  • Barua, M. (2023). Lively Cities: reconfiguring urban ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Department

Department of Geography

Education

  • DPhil (Geography), University of Oxford
  • MSc Distinction (Biodiversity, Conservation and Management), University of Oxford
  • BSc Distinction (Zoology Hons.), Dibrugarh University

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The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a globally influential research organization proudly based in Canada. We mobilize the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to advance transformative knowledge and solve humanity’s biggest problems, together. We are supported by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Québec, as well as Canadian and international foundations, individuals, corporations and partner organizations.

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