Dr Azmeary Ferdoush

PhD (University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA)

Pronouns: He/him
  • Lecturer in Human Geography
Publications
ORCiD Google Scholar
Dr Azmeary Ferdoush
  • Personal website
  • Bluesky

    • Academic Career:

    • 2024 onwards: Lecturer in Human Geography, Loughborough University
    • 2024 onwards: Docent in Political Geography, University of Oulu, Finland
    • 2022-2024: Research Council of Finland funded Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Eastern Finland, Finland
    • 2020-2022: Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oulu, Finland
    • 2015-2019: PhD, University of University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

    Professional Responsibilities:

    Azmeary works at the intersection of political geography, geographies of the global South, decolonial praxis, critical geopolitics, and qualitative research methods. Primarily applying ethnographic methods of investigation but often combining them with other tools such as auto-photography and activity journals, Azmeary specializes in studying migration, borders, (non)citizenship, nation, state, territory, and sovereignty. His past projects have empirically focused on Bangladesh and Finland.

    Azmeary remains interested in the questions of social (in)justice, specifically the right to move through a lens of identity-based inequalities and categorical privileges. Consequently, he asks how artificially created categories and identities affect marginal peoples' lives and embodied experiences from a spatio-temporal perspective. At the same time, Azmeary takes a cautious stand regarding "importing" ready-made ideas from the Global North to the Global South in terms of both theory and methods.

    Azmeary’s current research, Geographies of Example (GeoEx), is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award valued at £900K (2026-2030). He leads a team of PDRAs and DRs who, as part of the project, empirically focus on the UK, Finland, and Bangladesh.

    His past projects have been funded by, among others, the Research Council of Finland and the American Association of Geographers (AAG). He was offered an Asia Research Institute postdoctoral fellowship (2020) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a Core Fellowship at the University of Helsinki, which he declined. He was awarded a prestigious East-West Center Graduate Degree Fellowship funded by the US government to pursue his PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

    Azmeary’ s current research interest may be divided under three broader themes

    • Geographies of the example and the exception
    • Borders, mobility, and migration
    • State, sovereignty, and (non)citizenship

    As an educator, Azmeary’s teaching style centres on diverse and experiential learning, a method that is compatible with our ever-increasing engagements with the virtual world. He encourages students to begin to connect the dots between theories of human geography and social life by referring to their daily encounters in the classroom, the wider society, and the world of the web.

    Three keywords motivate Azmeary’s philosophy of teaching: student-centric, reciprocal, and diverse. He puts students at the centre of a course so that the topics raised in class may enable students to identify and develop their own social, political, and intellectual agendas. Azmeary’s classes are consciously designed and planned so each of them becomes an interactive and reciprocal exercise of knowledge sharing instead of a one-way flow of lectures.

    Azmeary’s pedagogical approach has been significantly influenced by his embodied and academic experience as he lived and taught in Bangladesh, the United States, and Finland. He actively creates room for local students and students of colour to ensure their "voices" are heard. Classes are declared "safe spaces" to make sure that students of diverse and international backgrounds feel comfortable in expressing their points of view, which may not always match with the taken-for-granted theoretical strands, methods, and history of the social sciences in the Global North.

    Azmeary has (co)taught numerous modules both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. These classes range in size (large introductory lectures and small sections), format (in-person and online), topics (general and specialized), and across institutions.

    By meeting them on their own terms but maintaining high yet achievable expectations, Azmeary mentors students toward becoming confident communicators and sophisticated thinkers. In turn, he expects to be held to an equally high standard by his students.

    Current Postgraduate Students

    • Benjamin Costello
    • Thomas Bennett

    Peer-reviewed journal articles

    Book

    Edited volume