Welcome to Dr. Ahsan Kamal

The Department of Ethnologie warmly welcomes Dr. Ahsan Kamal, who will be with the South Asia Institute until October 2023. Dr. Ahsan Kamal is a Lecturer of Pakistan Studies at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, where he teaches courses in social theory, research methods, water politics, and socio-natural conflicts.  He collaborates with collectives and community-activist alliances, focusing on climate justice, land and water commons, and socio-ecological impacts of large infrastructure projects.  Dr. Kamal is currently authoring a book, Saving Sindhu: The Death and Defense of the Indus River, which explores the spread and hold of the ideas of river death and defense among riverine and agrarian communities. The book drwas from his doctoral research in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, for which he received the 2020 Pirzada Prize from the University of California Berkeley, recognizing it as the best dissertation on Pakistan in Social Sciences, Humanities, Law and Education in North America and Europe.

Dr. Kamal has upcoming publications addressing the recent "decolonization turn" in academia, where he argues for the need for southern theorising. His most recent publication is titled "Climate, floods, and migration in Pakistan", published in the Journal of International Migration, 61(4), 349–352.