Fragments in time
This talk will consist of ruminations on the relationship between space, knowledge and materiality. Drawing upon my own work, I hope to invite those attending this lecture to think through questions of the relationship between work and life, the deep entanglement between biography and history (so aptly reflected upon by C Wright Mills in his text “The Sociological Imagination” and generations of others who came before him), and the lessons and vexities of experience so central to the feminist imagination and project(s). While my own work is largely located within a particular spatial location — regions which we today call ‘South Asia’ and the ‘Middle East’ (the latter sometime more expansively MENA i.e. Middle East and North Africe) — the questions posed in this talk apply as readily to those whose academic interests and preoccupations reside outside this particular socio-spatial configuration.
Professor and Chair of Sociology Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College since 1987. Visiting faculty member in the Sociology Department at the American University of Cairo, and at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, where she taught at different times in their Sociology, Political Science, and Women’s Studies Departments and programs. Completed her undergraduate work at Kinnaird College, and M.S. at Punjab University, in Lahore, Pakistan. Undertook further graduate studies at the American University in Beirut, and Masters and PhD at UW Madison, latter at the Land Tenure Center. Academic specializations in historical sociology, gender, media studies, and political economy. Area specializations include the Middle East and South Asia. Author of Shifting Body Politics: Gender, Nation, State (2004), and the co-edited volume, Situating Globalization: Views from Egypt (2000). Has contributed to numerous anthologies and journals on South Asia and the Middle East. Currently book review editorial board for the journal Dialectical Anthropology, and member of the Executive Committee of the American Institute for Pakistan Studies. Past holder of grants from Fulbright, AIPS, Social Science Research Council and others.