About
I am a human geographer working in the broad ambit of Marxist and post-colonial/anti-colonial theory, with a focus on Pakistan specifically and the global South generally. I have a particular interest in the works and uptakes of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Frantz Fanon.
My publications in English and Urdu have explored a range of issues in social and geographical theory: including social movements and labour, state theory, urban development and restructuring, imperialism and dependency, post-/anti-colonial literature, and the relationship between “particular” and “universal” in social theory and political practice
My academic work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Studies in Political Economy, The Social Register, Urban Geography, Antipode, Political Geography, EPA: Economy and Space, and Tarikh [History]. I am also part of the editorial collective of the radical geography journal Antipode.
In addition, I do regular public engagement work through articles, interviews, and podcasts for popular outlets. My writing and interviews have appeared in venues such as Jacobin, The News, Jamhoor, Novara Media, Socialist Project, and BBC Urdu.
My current work is focussed along two axes, united by an overall goal. First, I am working on a political history of the working class in Karachi, Pakistan. This project integrates participatory ethnography, oral history, archival research, and literary criticism to explore the social-spatial mediations of working-class life and politics in post-1970s Karachi. Through a geographical seat in Karachi, one of the world's largest cities, the project contributes to vexed debates within and between Marxism, post-colonialism, and post-structuralism. Second, I am engaged with labour, social movements and organisations of marginalised groups across Pakistan's urban-rural and core-peripheral regions in an effort to understand their socio-spatial bases and their political, cultural, and economic visions.
Overall, I am invested in the development of an integral and anti-colonial Marxism: one which moves beyond usual dualisms between subjective/objective, culture/political economy, meaning/materiality, space/time, synchrony/diachrony and East/West, towards a properly relational understanding of different geographies and domains of social life.