Biography

Dhiren Borisa is a Dalit queer activist, poet and a urban sexual geographer and teaches courses on gender and sexuality studies  at the Jindal Global Law School. He has been a Global Fellow (Education) at the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews (2024-25) and was an Urban Studies Foundation International fellow at University of Sheffield for 2022-23. He has also been an honorary visiting fellow (non-residential) at the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester (2020-23) and an early career visiting fellow at the Leicester Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Leicester, UK (2019). 

Dhiren obtained his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on queer cartographies of desires in Delhi. His research analyses how desire shapes the city we live and produce, asking how we can use sex as an archive for reading the city. He centres lower caste and working class queer desires which are often marginalized to reimagine sexual geographies of freedom and futures. Using rich ethnographies of queer nightlife, cruising spaces, sexual transactions in moving public and semi-public infrastructures, and mapping the city through gay dating apps, he asks: If global and local media discourses tell us that our cities are sexy, who exactly gets to be sexy in our city? His work through an auto-ethnographic storytelling of places, people and precarities explores ephemera as a social space of survival of desires for many who are at the margins of the already marginalized queer desires. 

As a human geographer and a scholar of geographies of sexualities from the global south he documents and interprets trans, queer, and feminist transnational South Asian cultures, employing intersectional and decolonial understandings both in India and amongst diasporic queer worldings. As an activist-scholar located in and working from the Global South, his research is informed and inspired by third world feminist thought and everyday dalit, queer and feminist struggles and modes of resilience in India. This thoroughly reflects in his teaching, research, collaborations, and community organizing. He has recently co-authored a book on Social Geographies alongside Kath Browne, Niharika Banerjea, and Mary Gilmartin and is currently working on his first monograph on caste, queerness and city-making in India.