Harmandeep Kaur Gill

Position:

Junior Research Fellow, Linacre College

 

Faculty / College Address:

Oriental Institute 

 

Email:

harmandeep.gill@orinst.ox.ac.uk

 

Research interests:

  • Exile and belonging

  • Solitude and community 

  • Old age and death 

  • Care

  • Knowledge and ethics (in anthropology)

  • Decolonization 

 

My work is based among the Tibetan exile community in India. I have done fieldwork on and written about the Tibetan self-immolations, the Tibetan freedom struggle in exile, and most recently about aging and dying among elderly exiled Tibetans. I attempt to write intimate portraits that move between the personal and the social, the lived and the possible, and the real and the imagined. I am drawn to the hidden and intangible aspects of life and experience. I take inspiration from phenomenological approaches in anthropology, socially and politically engaged scholarship and visual forms of expression. 

 

Current projects:

Fractures and Connections: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitude in Tibetan Exile

 

Publications:

 

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. Forthcoming. Reaching the Mountain Top: Coming to Terms with Solitude, Decline, and Death in Tibetan Exile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  • Gill, Harmandeep K., Theresia Hofer. Eds. Forthcoming. Writing with Care: Ethnographies from the Tibetan and Himalayan Margins. HIMALAYA: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. Forthcoming. "Old Tibetan Hands." In Writing with Care: Ethnographies from the Tibetan and Himalayan Margins, edited by H. Gill and T. Hofer. HIMALAYA: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. 

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. 2023: "‘Setting off from the Mountain Pass’: Facing Death and Preparing for the Journey Ahead in  Tibetan Exile." In Aspiring in Later Life: Making Selves, Places, Relations Across Locales, edited by M. Amrith, V.K. Sakti, and D. Sampaio. Rutgers University Press.

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. 2022: "Imagining Care: Carers, TV and Touch." In Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World, edited by C. Mattingly and L. Grøn. Fordham Press.

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. et. al. 2021. Det forestilte baklandet: Hjem og tilhørighet i alderdom/The Imagined Hinterland: Home and Belonging in Old Age. Norsk Antropologisk Tidsskrift.

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. 2015: Tibetan Self-Immolations: A Sacrifice and the Tibetan Freedom Struggle in Exile, India. Betwixt and Between, University of Oslo.

  • Gill, Harmandeep K. 2015: Knapt en prosent av befolkningen har styrt Kina med jernhånd siden 1949. Aftenposten.

harmandeep gill