Rupak grew up in the city of Patan, Nepal, or as a child he thought the city grew around him — learning and relearning from the people that laboured in it and the alleys old and new in which they traversed. Before engaging with social theory, he learned from the social life worlds of the city — on how identity is constitutive of coexistence yet something that already always conditions exclusion. This was an iterative and a visual process of learning about, and being in, the world.

 

Outside of South Asia, Rupak's life journeys — in a white central Minnesotan town, Latino Pilsen in Chicago, and Pan-Asian Flushing/Jackson Heights in Queens, NY — have taught him that social and political life is always more-than-textual. He takes these experiences to heart in participating in ethnographic research as a visual geographer by engaging with photography and film. His research projects are guided by these life experiences in asking how sovereignty is realized and enacted in the everyday. He completed a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022. He is currently an Assistant Professor of International Studies and Global Asia at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.