Sara Smith is a political geographer with a South Asia focus, specializing in feminist political geography and political geographies of youth and the future. She has been involved in non-profit work and research in India since 1999. Her Ph.D. is in geography, and she has been teaching in UNC’s Department of Geography since 2009. Professor Smith’s current research in the Ladakh region of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State addresses the ways that individuals’ personal lives (especially their decisions about love and babies) are entangled in territorial struggle. Smith is developing a new project about how marginalized young people from India’s remote mountain regions experience university life in major Indian cities and how this shapes their politics. If you are curious, you can find out more about this work on her faculty website: https://sarasmith.web.unc.edu/.