Professorial Lecturer

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Additional Positions at AU: Professorial Lecturer
Degrees: PhD University of Texas Austin
MA University of Texas Austin
BA Brooklyn College, CUNY
Bio: My research and teaching interests span social movements, political ecology, racial capitalism in South Asia and its diasporas. My book, The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights in Pakistan (SUP 2019), is a history and ethnography of AMP, a land rights movement that successfully challenged the Pakistan military’s efforts to privatize state-owned lands. I am broadly interested in how poor marginalized communities strive to build a good life in the midst of economic uncertainty and repression. My scholarly publications analyze the role of infrastructure projects in shaping political subjectivity in Punjab Pakistan, the use of counter-terrorism policies to suppress peasant/indigenous demand for land rights’ and the complexities arising from civil society/ NGO involvement in grassroots struggles.

My current fieldwork research focus is on informal urbanism in Karachi’s food markets, and the role of these markets in structuring relations of coexistence in the aftermath of urban violence. I am also working on a DC based project that looks at the overlooked history and memory of the DC waterfront, especially the Potomac river through the framework of Racial capitalism.

See Also: Mrizvi
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