Presentation Description
Munazir’s dissertation interrogates the convergence of aspiration and Islamic ethics among middle class Muslim women in North India, problematizing conventional trajectories of social mobility within India’s majoritarian landscape. With over fourteen months of ethnographic work, her research theorizes how women reconstitute futurity through ethical frameworks anchored in qadr (divine destiny). Moving beyond binaries of agency and submission, she argues that women’s quotidian discourse on destiny constitute “ethical labor”—the deliberate cultivation of sabr (patience) and khidmat (care) as modalities of social mobility. The dissertation contributes to critical conversations on Islamic becoming by demonstrating how ethics in discourse and practice functions as a site of world-making for marginalized subjects, offering new feminist frameworks for understanding moral agency within conditions of systematic exclusion.
About the Speaker
Shahana Munazir is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation examines the intersection of aspiration and ethical labor of care and patience in the lives of young Muslim women in North India. Her ongoing research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, Shenandoah University, and UW-Madison’s Department of Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies. Prior to joining UW-Madison, Shahana received the Chief Minister’s Fellowship to work with the Government of Delhi’s Department of Social Justice in 2018. She holds a B.A. in History from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, Somerville College. Her ethnographic research on khidmat (care) has been published in the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal and featured in Anthropology News.