Biography

Tina Harris received her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2009 from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and is a member of the AISSR Moving Matters research group.

She has conducted field research in Tibet, Nepal, India, and the Netherlands, and has published articles on the pressures of controlling air traffic, borderland airports, and competing discourses over the reopening of a Sino-Indian mountain border. She is author of Geographical Diversions: Tibetan Trade, Global Transactions (UGa Press 2013), a book that examines how state power is both articulated and circumvented by cross-border traders in the Himalayas.

Geographical diversions

Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India.  How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change?

Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and histories of trade are produced.  

The economic rise of China and India has received attention from the international media, but the effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these nationstates—in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal—have rarely been covered. Geographical Diversions challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs from many theories of macroscale economic change. 

Current research projects

My current projects focus on aviation. I investigate how people working in air traffic management, route planning, and operations sectors are dealing with the recent shifts in global air travel against the backdrop of geopolitical conflicts and increasing climate concerns. I am also writing my second book, a crossover book that mixes travel writing, memoir, and ethnography to explore why we fly.

Please see my Publications page for recent articles on these topics.

Networks and organizations

I am currently the UvA lead of the Horizon Europe project, the Eur-Asian Border Lab, co-chair of the Board of the International Institute for Asian Studies, and an academic coordinator of the Asian Borderlands Research Network (ABRN), which will hold its next conference in Taiwan in January 2025.

Upcoming and recent conferences, invited lectures, and invited workshops

• Invited keynote, “Infrastructural Shapeshifting and Mobile Lives,” Global Mobility Humanities Conference, “Mobility, Infrastructure, and the Humanities,” Konkuk Unversity, Seoul, 28-29 October 2022. https://www.mobilityhumanities.net/keynotes
• Invited keynote, “Aviation Infrastructure and the Fixing of Flying,” Conférence Universitaire de la Suisse Occidentale (CUSO) Workshop, “Infrastructure and Life,” Juf, Switzerland, 15-17 June, 2022 
• “What Can We Learn from Ethnographies of Infrastructure?” Planning the Cycling City, Urban Cycling Institute, UvA, 6 July, 2022.
• “‘Not A Bot’: Rehearsing Automated Futures in Aviation,” CADS Research Seminar, Leiden University, 27 September 2021
• “It’s Not Easy Being Green: Technology, Sustainability, and Time in Aviation,”Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, 5 May 2021.
• “Aviation and Borders in the Himalayas” Transport Studies Unit, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, 13 February, 2020

• “Manufacturing Aeromobilities: Infrastructures, Displacement, and the Extra-sectoral Costs of Air-Enabled Worlds” with Weiqiang Lin, Royal Geographical Society Annual Meeting, 27-29 August 2019
• “Development Zones in Asia,” Aarhus University, 17-19 June, 2019
• "Air Pressure: Time and Aviation in Nepal," UBC Himalaya Program, University of British Columbia, 12 October, 2018.
• "What Can We Learn from Ethnographies of Infrastructure?," Global Challenges in Transport, Oxford Leadership Programme/Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 7 September, 2018.
• “Lag: Temporality in the Himalayan Borderlands,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 30 November-4 December, 2017.
• “4D Bordering in the Himalayas,” Asian Borderlands Conference, Kathmandu, Nepal, 12-14 December, 2016.
• “Skirmish Season: Bordering Practices in the Himalayas,” Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University, New York, 28 January, 2016
• "Borderland Airports, Cosmopolitan Belongings," As sociation of American Geographers Annual Conference, Chicago, April 21, 2015
• "Himalayan Border Crossings" Invited Lecture, Development Studies Lecture Series, SOAS, October 15, 2013
• Invited Keynote Lecture, "Tracing Connections – Explorations of Spaces and Places in Asian Multilocalities", Centre for Development Studies (ZELF), Freie Universität Berlin, 20-21 June, 2013
• "The Yak's Tail: On Contemporary Changes in Trade in the Himalayas", International Association for Tibetan Studies 13th Seminar, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, July 20-27, 2013.
• "The Mobile and the Material in Sino-Indian Borderlands," American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 14-18, 2012
• "Yak Tails, Rice Cookers, and Changing Corridors in Asian Borderlands" 3rd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network (ABRN), Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Oct 11-13, 2012.
• "Haunting the Border and Flooding the Market: Trade and the Indo-Tibetan Interface," Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) Himalayan Studies Conference, St. Paul,Minnesota, Oct 28-30 2011 
• Workshop on Informality and Borders, Comparative Research on Regional Integration and Social Cohesion Conference, University of Johannesburg, November 30-December 2, 2011 
• "Nature, Capital, and Rule," Symposium on Environment, Society, and Development: Accumulation, Securitization and the Politics of Rule, NUI Galway, August 23, 2011
• "'A Geographical Excuse' and the Lhasa-Kalimpong Trade Route," MIASU Lecture Series, University of Cambridge, March 1, 2011.
• "'Zomia,' the Southeast Asian and Himalayan Massifs: Takes on Highland Transnational Spaces," Asian Borderlands Conference, Chiang Mai, Thailand, Nov 5-7, 2010
• "Cartographic Anxiety: The Lhasa-Kalimpong Trade Route and the Production of Space," for a panel on "The Production of Space: Social and Environmental Change Amidst Development in Tibetan Areas," International Association of Tibetan Studies Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Aug 15-21, 2010
• "Qualitative Research Methods in Anthropology," Ph.D. Seminar in Qualitative Research, Department of Mass Communications, Texas Tech University, April 9, 2010
• "Dispossession, Geographical Blindspots, and the Quest for Coherence in the Indo-Sino-Nepal Borderlands," Panel on Axes of Dispossession: Conflict, Identity, and the Neoliberal Economy in South Asia, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, Dec 2-6, 2009
• Antipode Summer Institute for the Geographies of Justice II, University of Manchester/University of Leeds, May 17-22, 2009
• "Geopolitics and Insecurity II: Encountering Productions of State Security" and "The 2008 Tibetan Uprising: Reflections One Year Later," Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, March 22-27, 2009.

Selected courses

• Technologies and Infrastructures (BA Anthropology)
• Theory of Ethnographic Research/Fieldwork Seminar (MA Research Masters Social Sciences)
• Perceptions of Asia (BA Anthropology)
• Designing Fieldwork (MA Anthropology)
• Comparative History and Sociology (BA Anthropology)
• Mobility, Migration, Security (MA International Development Studies)
• Research Methods and Design (MA Contemporary Asian Studies)
• Thesis Seminar (MA Contemporary Asian Studies)