As assistant professor, at the School of International Relations and Politics (SIRP), Mahatma Gandhi University, Dr. Mathew A. Varghese, engages broadly with core pedagogic concerns in political geography as well as international political economy. Apart from these he has designed electives drawing from his domain of research that engages with emergent concerns in international relations and politics. These include, global urbanisation processes and city ecologies, political ecology and dimensions of the anthropocene as well as politics of climate change.
He also offers innovative methodological courses like political ethnography and modern German political philosophy. Dr. Varghese is an adjunct faculty at the Institute for Multidisciplinary Programmes in Social Sciences (IMPSS), Mahatma Gandhi University, where he teaches a two-part ethnography course. He supervises PhD researchers, at the SIRP as well as Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE). There are post-doctoral fellows on his mentorship.
His PhD research “Spatial Reconfigurations and New Social Formations: The Contemporary Urban Context of Kerala” was done at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen (Norway). A book ‘Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia‘ (jointly done with Tereza Kuldova), was published by Palgrave Macmillan. At UKZN, South Africa, during post-doctoral research he was part of a team that enquired into the deployment of ecological infrastructure in the Durban region. Previously a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Varghese is also associated, as a researcher with Urban Enclaving Futures, Norway. He is also the Hon. Director of the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS) that he is building up as an extension centre at the M G University.
As the joint director of the newly constituted International Centre for Polar Studies (ICPS) at M G University, Varghese is involved in the development of pedagogic, research and extension work that concerns interdisciplinary engagements in the polar regions. He has previously worked in the Norwegian Research Council supported projects as well as at Forestry and Human Dimensions Division; Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI), under Science and Technology Department of Kerala, India.
The academic pursuits, publications as well as public disseminations largely come in the following realms: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Challenges in Social Sciences, Political Geography, Anthropology of Development, Urban Spatiality and Material Cultures, Political designs in the Anthropocene; Ecologies/ Human Ecologies in the Making.
Email: matzwordz@gmail.com
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