Ways of Thinking and Doing Research

Over the last two decades, Karachi has undergone dramatic socio-political, spatial and climatic changes. With rising inequalities, heightened securitization, urban flooding, heatwaves, violent infrastructural development and ongoing state-led displacement of vulnerable groups, Karachi is a site of many interlaced socio-political processes that inform contemporary urbanization in Pakistan. This webinar attempts to host a methodological inquiry into what it means to think through and do research with(in) fraught and fractured geographies. With the various relational and indigenous histories and practices that continue to vulnerably exist in the city, how can cross-collaborative research between art, academia and activism attempt to do politically engaged and aware research? We open with these questions to encourage dialogue into other ways of thinking and doing, engaging methodology, pedagogy and practice. 

Speakers 

The webinar invites Dr. Sobia Ahmed Kaker, Shahna Rajani and Aseela Haque in conversation with Ali Samoo.

Dr. Sobia Ahmed Kaker

Dr. Sobia is an interdisciplinary academic, working on the intersection of sociology, criminology and urban studies. Her research focuses on the governance of everyday insecurity and uncertainty in societies marked by extreme class inequalities and ethno-political differences. Prior to joining Essex in 2021, she held academic posts at Goldsmiths, University of London and LSE Cities. She has also had experience of working in research and policy institutions in Islamabad and Karachi.

Shahana Rajani

Shahana Rajani is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the visualities, landscapes and infrastructures of development, militarisation and ecological disturbance in Pakistan. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her practice. Working across moving image, installation and printed matter, she engages with dissident histories, lineages and practices of representation and relation that sustain ecological resistance in Pakistan. She is a co-founder of Karachi LaJamia (with Zahra Malkani) which is an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies emerging from struggles around land and water in the city.

Aseela Haque

Aseela Haque is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Human Geography at Free University Berlin in Germany. Her work has been published in journals such as Urban Planning, New Sociological Perspectives, IJURR and South Asia Chronicle.

Ali Samoo

Ali Samoo is a graduate student in Urban Studies within the EMJMD 4CITIES consortium with ongoing research in Malir, Karachi, exploring questions of land, dispossession and resistance. Previously, Ali was a researcher at the Karachi Urban Lab working on the multi-city Cool Infrastructures project.