Malini Sur is an anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker. She is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Director of Graduate Studies and Teaching at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her research and teaching explore the political possibilities surrounding mobility—encompassing territory, people, goods, and ideas in the context of British colonialism, post-colonial border-making and Indigeneity, and the local moorings of globalization and climate. Her research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Dutch Research Council (NWO), Ministry of Education Singapore and awards from the Tata Trusts. A/P Sur has served as the President of the Australian Anthropological Society (2023). Trained in comparative, historical, and visual methods, she is noted for her contributions within and beyond academia. A/P Sur is currently completing a documentary film on the social life of the Parramatta/Burramatta River.

A/P Sur’s book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was awarded the President’s Book Prize from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia and Bernard S. Cohen Prize (honorable mention). It was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2022. Jungle Passports has been reviewed in sixteen journals including PoLAR, Feminist Anthropology, Contributions to Indian Sociology, and Antipode and featured in book forums in the Australian Journal of Anthropology and Borderlines. She has published in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History,  Modern Asian Studies and PoLAR. Her work features in Public Books New York, New Books Network, Conversations in Anthropology and The Polis Project. A/P Sur has also commented widely in the media including the ABC.

A/P Sur is working on a book manuscript that takes the ubiquitous vendor’s bicycle as the material of social organization, political life and climate in urban India. In addition, she is leading three research projects. The first takes Australia’s Northern Territory as the starting point for exploring the transnational motions of Indian migrant workers.  She is exploring the cultural ramifications of rice-eating, metabolism and diabetes bringing together regenerative biologists, cereal scientists, scholars of medicine and health and anthropologists. As a part of an Australian Research Council-funded project and in collaboration with the Powerhouse Museum, she is leading a research strand on Parramatta/Burramatta River working with curators, artists, scientists, policy makers and local and transnational communities.

A/P Sur teaches undergraduate courses on the anthropology of globalization, power and cultural change, everyday life and social theory at the School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University. She has worked and held fellowships at the Australian National University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Toronto, the National University of Singapore, and the Social Science Research Council (New York). A/P Sur is an Associate Editor of South Asia – Journal of South Asian Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Commoning Ethnography and Humanities Research. She has served on the Executive Committee of the South Asian Studies Association of Australia (2017-2020) and was ICS’ Deputy Director of Engagement and International (2021-2022).  Her first documentary film Life Cycle has been screened in Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Baltimore, Santiago, Singapore, Kolkata, and New York and her photographs have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu, and Munich.