Research

I am an ethnographer and cultural sociologist of empire and colonialism whose work contributes to global sociology, political sociology and the sociology of race and ethnicity. Across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States, I examine how imperial and postcolonial orders produce racialized hierarchies, organize political belonging, and shape possibilities for action. My research is grounded in sustained fieldwork with literary communities in Kabul and working-class Hindu communities in Karachi. Combining ethnography and interviews with archival and documentary analysis, I connect people’s interpretations of power to the relationships, institutions, and material environments through which it operates. Centering occupied and subordinated subjects and drawing on Black and Muslim anticolonial thought, I show how empire narrows political horizons, produces racialized threats, and organizes national belonging.

Focus Areas

My research examines how imperial and postcolonial relations shape racial hierarchies, national belonging, and possibilities for political action. Through ethnography, interviews, and archival and documentary analysis, I trace the relationship between material power and meaning-making: how security infrastructures, colonial classifications, and everyday encounters produce judgments about who belongs, who poses a threat, and who is capable of self-rule. This work connects racialization to coercion and profit while examining how people interpret and navigate the hierarchies that subordinate them.

Across these projects, I ask how colonial histories shape attachments to land, claims to sovereignty, and political horizons—and how people sustain intellectual communities, relationships, and meaningful lives under conditions of domination. Drawing on Black and Muslim anticolonial thought, I approach occupied and postcolonial societies as generative sites for building sociological theory about culture, race, and power.

Theoretical work

Theoretically, my work brings anticolonial and postcolonial thought into conversation with cultural and political sociology to explain how imperial power operates through material coercion and cultural meaning, producing racial hierarchies, organizing political belonging, and shaping possibilities for collective life. Methodologically, I advance qualitative approaches that prioritize subaltern voices and situated knowledge to deepen insights into imperial governance, racialized violence, and possibilities of resistance. Through this integrated lens, my research illuminates how empire operates not only as a global structure of power but also as a lived and interpreted reality, materialized through infrastructures, racialized judgments, everyday social worlds and possible futures.