Lecture by Dr. Maira Hayat, the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies recipient for 2019.
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DATE: Monday, November 30, 2020
TIME: 9 am Berkeley | 5 pm London | 10 pm Islamabad | 10:30 pm New Delhi | 10:30 pm Dhaka | Calculate Your Local Time
This event will also be live streamed on the Institute's FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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Dissertation Abstract
Pakistan has one of the worlds largest irrigation networks and an agriculture-dependent economy. Groundwater extraction has made the Indus Basin the worlds second most overstressed aquifer. Bottled water corporations, reliant on extracting groundwater, are currently demanding more tax concessions in court, claiming that instead of doing business they provide a public service given the states failure to provide clean water. In 2018, Pakistan declared a national water scarcity crisis. This was not Pakistans first water crisis: from the 1950s crisis of waterlogging and salinity, to India-Pakistan hostility over shared rivers stoking U.S. Cold War era-fears and intervention, water has long provided the material from, against and with which the promise of modernity is crafted.
Ecologies of Water Governance in Pakistan: The Colony, the Corporation and the Contemporary examines the performativity of state failure, arguing that the public-private distinction is produced in the ethical labor bureaucrats expend in not doing corruption; in court intervention; and in regimes of corporate profitability. The dissertation has three temporal anchors: British colonial rule; the 1960s, Pakistans Decade of Development; and the present moment. It is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Pakistans Punjab province. Read the full abstract HERE
Speaker Bio
Dr. Maira Hayat is a Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Universitys Anthropology Department and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Her research develops a conversation among the anthropology of bureaucracy, law, ethics and Islam; political ecology; science and technology studies and postcolonial critique.
Dr. Hayat is currently working on her book manuscript, Ecologies of water theft in Pakistan: the colony, the corporation and the contemporary.
Another ongoing project, a study of postcolonial sovereignty as it is interrupted by imperial projects, traces the waxing and waning of the promise of the postcolonial in Pakistan through an examination of forms of government and jurisdiction in Pakistans northwest. The most recent phase of this research examines legal action taken by families of drone strike victims.
Dr. Hayat's research has received fellowship support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, Pakistan. At the University of Chicago, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Leiffer and Orin William Fellowships have provided support.
More about Dr. Hayat HERE
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The Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Endowment on Pakistan, established by Rafat Pirzada and his wife, Amna Jaffer, and named after Rafat Pirzadas father, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, supports i) the Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Dissertation Prize on Pakistan (an annual dissertation prize for the best work in the humanities, social sciences, law, or public health on Pakistan, the region that is Pakistan, or things to do with Pakistan), and ii) the Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Lecture on Pakistan (an annual lecture that spotlights the winner of the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize). Rafat Pirzada is a Silicon Valley based entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
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The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
