The panel brings together Dr Zoha Waseem, Dr Sanaa Alimia, and Dr Waqas Butt, authors of three exciting new books on urban life and relations in Pakistan. Based on detailed ethnographic research, these works bring together a variety of issues - an infrastructures, caste and ethnic marginalisation, policing and securitisation, and global circuits of people and capital - to explore the complex ways in which urban life is currently unfolding across South Asia and the world. These concerns have assumed renewed salience as cities in Asia and Africa are being remade through mega infrastructures and corridor investments like that of CPEC in Pakistan. Participants in the panel will discuss their books and bring their research in conversation with each other to explore some of the following concerns:
- The multiple ways in which historical legacies, particularly colonial formations of knowledge production and governance continue to structure contemporary configurations of caste, ethnicities, and social inequalities.
- The role of labour, everyday place-making, and community mobilization in the ways in which cities are built and sustained through the work of marginalized social groups.
- The multiple forms of securitization of spaces and populations mark urban life in post 9/11 Pakistan.
- The enmeshment of everyday urban life forms across Pakistan in global flows of ideas, people, goods, and capital.
- The cities as sites of identity making as urban centres in Pakistan change rapidly due to rural-to-urban migration, arrival and deportation of Afghan refugees, and settlement of internally displaced people fleeing military operations and ecological disasters.
The panel will address these pressing issues and explore how they shape and are in turn transformed through new multiscaler regimes of investment in infrastructures and will be moderated by Dr Sobia Ahmad Kaker and Palwasha Amanullah.
Dr Kaker is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. She is an interdisciplinary urban studies scholar, working on the governance of everyday insecurity and uncertainty in rapidly urbanising postcolonial contexts.
Palwasha Amanullah is currently a PhD candidate at Sheffield School of Architecture, The University of Sheffield. Her research expands the knowledge of temporal bordering practices and explores how a city can also be lived otherwise to accommodate the desires between urban conflict and culture.
Books Presented
Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (Hurst & co.) by Zoha Waseem, Warwick University
Dr Zoha Waseem is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. She is also Co-Coordinator for the Urban Violence Research Network, hich is an international platform that connects researchers and academics working on urban violence, security, and related issues.
Refugee Cities: How Afghans changed Urban Pakistan (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Sanaa Alimia, The Agha Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, London.
Dr Sanaa Alimia is a political scientist with a focus on migration, surveillance, and urbanity. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Agha Khan University, London.
Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan (Stanford University Press) by Waqas H. Butt, University of Toronto, Scarborough
Dr. Waqas H. Butt is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, carborough. His research and writing examines the interconnections between infrastructures and urbanism in Pakistan, with a focus on waste, labor, and social stratification.