Location:

19-A FCC, Gulberg IV, off Syed Maratib Ali Road

  Start Date:

Friday, January 11, 2019

  End Date:

Friday, January 11, 2019

  Time:

3.30pm - 5.30pm

Pakistan Outside-In: Muslim Self-Representation, Class Distinctions and the World Beyond

Please join us for a book talk with Dr. Ammara Maqsood, who will be sharing her recently published work – The New Pakistani Middle Class. She will be in conversation with Dr. Faisal Bari, CEO and Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS.

Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence – a country thwarted in its march towards modernity and progress. In this talk, Dr. Maqsood will examine these narratives, unraveling the linkages through which they are constructed and, moreover, how they shape and affect local class politics. Using excerpts from her recent book, The New Pakistani Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2017), she will focus on such themes in relation to religious trends and practices amongst the upwardly mobile urban groups – the new middle class – in Lahore, and the ways in which they interpret and navigate local and global hierarchies.

Ammara Maqsood is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at UCL Anthropology in University College London. Her research coalesces around questions of middle-class religiosity, aspirations, intimate subjectivities and urban politics in Pakistan. Dr. Maqsood has held research and teaching positions at Manchester, Oxford and King’s College London, including an ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The New Pakistani Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2017).