Using Sex as an Archive of the city: New Insights into understanding Urban sexual Geographies from Global South Perspective
Funding period: 1 February 2023 – 31 October 2023
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Dr. Dhiren Borisa is a Dalit queer activist, poet, and an urban sexual geographer, and is currently employed as Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law school, India. He is also an honorary visiting fellow at School of Geography, Geology and Environment at University of Leicester, UK. Dr. Borisa attained his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on Queer Cartographies of Desires in Delhi. His research engages with sexual mappings and makings of cities from an intersectional and decolonial lens both among queer spaces in India and in diasporic queer worldings.
As a USF International fellow, Dr. Borisa will spend nine months working with Prof. Gavin Brown at the Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield.
This fellowship will allow him to develop his doctoral research into a monograph, which foregrounds city making through Dalit and queer experiences in India. As a first-generation learner, queer, and member of a historically caste oppressed community, his book is uniquely positioned to bring a fresh critical perspective to urban theorizing from the Global South. As an auto-ethnographic storytelling of the city, his research articulates innovative ways of envisioning worlding by using the register of the sexual and the ways in which it is constituted, transacted, and sequestered in the city fabric. Locating the queer peripheries in terms of the city’s unwanted across the axes of geography, caste, class, religion and sexuality, his work provides new insights around queerness and Southern Urban theory.