Wani Mehraj

My research is situated at the interdisciplinary confluence of political geography, border studies, mobility studies, and critical tourism scholarship, with a particular regional focus on the socio-spatial complexities of South Asia. Broadly, I interrogate how borders, territorial regimes, and geopolitical imaginaries shape the lived experiences of mobility, identity formation, belonging, and cross-border socio-cultural interaction within regions historically constituted through conflict, partition, contested sovereignties, and uneven state formations. A central concern of my scholarship lies in theorizing tourism and mobility not merely as economic or recreational phenomena, but as deeply political and relational processes implicated in the production of transnational subjectivities, negotiated territorialities, and alternative geographies of regional connectivity.

Drawing upon borderland theory, critical geopolitics, mobility studies, and postcolonial geographical thought, I examine how everyday cross-border encounters and people-to-people interactions operate as subaltern spatial practices capable of unsettling statist imaginaries and rigid territorial epistemologies. My research further explores the socio-political and ecological dimensions of community-based tourism within peripheral, frontier, and marginalized regions, with particular interest in how local communities negotiate development, cultural preservation, and environmental sustainability within contexts shaped by geopolitical precarity and uneven development.

Bachelor of Arts - General - Amar Singh College Srinagar (2014)

Master of Arts - Geography and Disaster Management - University of Kashmir (2018)

National Eligibility Text Exam - University Grants Commission (2019)

Ph.D. - Geography - University of Kashmir (2025)