Maan Barua

Associate, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development; University Lecturer in Human Geography, Cambridge University

Maan is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, and a research affiliate of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.

Maan completed his DPhil in human geography at the School of Geography and the Environment in 2013 (Clarendon and Senior Hulme Scholar, Brasenose College). He has an undergraduate degree in the biological sciences from India (First class; 1st; honours) and an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management (Distinction), also from Oxford.

Maan’s research is situated within environmental and cultural geography, the central axis of which focuses on the spatialities, politics and governance of the living and material world. It conceptually develops two of geography’s vibrant sub-fields – more-than-human geography and political ecology – with which he has engaged through his doctoral and postdoctoral research. Maan teaches environmental and human geography at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Hid work engages political ecology and posthumanist thought to develop new understandings of the geographies of nature. Of particular interest are nonhuman ecologies and processes pertaining to production, landscape and knowledge. Maan’s ongoing and past work interrogates these ecologies through a number of empirical foci, including urban ecologies, nonhuman labour and commodity production, and historical and contemporary more-than-human geographies. A theme cutting through these empirics is the traffic between nature and capital, and more broadly, between ecology and economy.

Maan lectures on the ‘Environmental Geography’ foundation course for undergraduates, besides conducting tutorials on various human geography topics for different colleges. At postgraduate level, he co-teaches a module on ‘Conservation and Society’ on the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, and convenes an option ‘Urban Political Ecology’ for masters students across the School of Geography and the Environment.


Publications

Barua, M. and Jellis, T. (2018) Vocabularies for Urban Futures: Critical Reflections..

Barua, M. (2017) Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(2): 274-288.

Lorimer, J., Hodgetts, T. and Barua, M. (2017) Animals’ atmospheres. Progress in Human Geography.

Barua, M. (2016) Lively commodities and encounter value. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(4): 725-744.

Zablocki, J., Arora, S. and Barua, M. (2016) Factors affecting media coverage of species rediscoveries. Conservation Biology, 30(4): 914-917.

Barua, M. (2015) Encounter: Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities. Environmental Humanities, 7: 265-270.

Jadhav, S., Jain, S., Kannuri, N., Bayetti, C. and Barua, M. (2015) Ecologies of Suffering: Mental Health in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(20): 12-15.


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