Tania Ahmad
Professional Biography
I am a sociocultural anthropologist of urban class formation, public culture and stratification in South Asian and Muslim societies. My current research examines an emerging middle-class category in Karachi, Pakistan. I completed my doctorate at Stanford and from 2009-11, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
I became interested in anthropology while on a student exchange in Frankfurt, where I was studying German literature. Somehow, all my friends were anthropologists and foretold that I, too, would be taken in by the prospect of using everyday life as a starting point for analysis.
Education
Ph.D., Stanford University
M.Sc., Université de Montréal
B.A., McGill University
Research Interests
My work traces the emergence of a middle-class category in Karachi, Pakistan. I examine how an Urdu-speaking identity is intertwined with what it means to be middle-class. Moreover, I describe how this relation changed over time, and how Karachi residents imagine both the flexibility and limits of socioeconomic class and status. My findings are based on ethnographic field research with Urdu-speaking Karachi residents, whose parents and grandparents transformed both the city and their own lives by migrating to Pakistan following its independence in 1947. These Karachi residents use the English-language term middle-class to refer to particular neighbourhoods, political platforms and aspirations, but also use it to give meaning to their own positions within an imagined field of social relations. The processes of becoming middle-class in Karachi allow us to see how social privilege is perpetuated on the messy ground of practices and experiences that exceed direct political or economic control.
Course Information
Spring 2012
ANT 100B Introduction to Social Anthropology
ANT 274 Political Anthropology
ANT 375 Anthropology of Media
Fall 2011
ANT 100B Introduction to Social Anthropology
ANT 269 Anthropology of South Asia
