Aman Luthra

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Aman Luthra

Assistant Professor - Geography Undergraduate Advisor (Last names A - J)

Climate and Environmental Change


Contact:

Email: Aman Luthra
2036 H St., NW Washington DC 20052

Office Hours
Mondays 10:00am - 11:00am
Thursdays 3:00pm - 4:00 pm

Via Zoom link

Aman Luthra is Assistant Professor of Geography at the George Washington University. He is an undergraduate advisor for the Geography major and teaches courses in political ecology, development geography, and the geography of South Asia. Dr. Luthra received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD in 2015. He also holds an M.A. in Geography and an M.P.A from Syracuse University. His research primarily focuses on the changing landscape of labor and capital in the waste management sector in urban India, with a particular focus on informal workers in this industry. In addition to research on urban waste management, Dr. Luthra is also involved in an interdisciplinary collaborative project using citizen science to understand changing patterns of pollinator diversity and abundance in and around apple orchards in Uttarakhand. His research has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Luthra has published articles in several leading journals in geography including Antipode, Geographical Review, Geoforum, Progress in Environmental Geography, and Environment and Planning A and E.


Political Ecology
Economic Geography
Urban Infrastructure
Waste Management
Informal Sector

GEOG 1001 - Introduction to Human Geography
GEOG 3165 - Geography of South Asia
GEOG 3195 - Geography of Development
GEOG 3195 - Political Ecology
GEOG 6293 - Political Ecology

Luthra, A., J. Lowe and K. Ochoa Berkley. (2023). Dispossession by platformization: The rise of on-demand recycling in urban India. Geoforumhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103731

Luthra, A. (2023). Complexity and heterogeneity in the informal economy of waste: Problems and prospects for organising and formalizing. In F. Nunan, C. Barnes and S. Krishnamurthy (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook on Livelihoods in the Global SouthNew York: Routledge, pp. 322-332.

Luthra, A., K. Cunningham, A. Fraser, A. Pandey, S. Rana and V. Singh. (2022). Ecological Livelihoods of Farmers and Pollinators in the Himalayas: Doing Critical Physical Geography Using Citizen Science. The Canadian Geographer. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12799

Tucker, J., A. Luthra and C. Anderson. (2022). Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons. Antipodehttps://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12909

Luthra, A. and W. Monteith. (2021). Of market vendors and waste collectors: Labour, informality, and aesthetics in the era of world-class city making. Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12784

Luthra, A., B. Chaturvedi and S. Mukhopadhyay. (2021). Air pollution, waste management and livelihoods: Patterns of cooking fuel use among waste picker households in Delhi. Geographical Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00167428.2021.1941016

Luthra, A. (2021). Housewives and maids: The labor of household recycling in urban India. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4(2): 475-498. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620914219

Luthra, A. and C. Rosati. (2021). Emerging issues in post development for social justice: critical analysis of power, local place, and networks in globalization and post development. In S. Melkote, A. Singhal and S. Shirley (Eds.) Handbook of Communication and Development. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 59-82.

Luthra, A. (2020). Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers and the state in urban India. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 52(7): 1375-94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20913011

Luthra, A. (2018). Municipalization for privatization’s sake: Municipal solid waste collection services in India. Society and Business Review 14(2): 135-154https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-11-2017-0102

Luthra, A. (2018). ‘Old habits die hard’: Discourses of urban filth in the Swachh Bharat Mission and The Ugly Indian. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 13(2): 120-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2018.1467917

Luthra, A. (2017). Waste-to-energy and recycling: Competing systems of waste management in urban India. Economic and Political Weekly 52(13): 51-58.

2015 Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University

2004 M.A. and M.P.A. Syracuse University

2001 B.S. University of Maine at Machias