About

I am a research group leader at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. My team and I study the political and social movements of religious minorities in South Asia in the era of social media and communicative capitalism. My research and teaching cover cultural and post-colonial theory, the religious and ethnic minorities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the socio-anthropology of martial arts, and the role of documentary film in ethnographic research.

My books include: Hinglaj Devi. Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan (OUP 2018), Ritual Journeys (Routledge 2019, coedited with Christoph Bergmann), and Pakistan. Alternative Imaginings of the Nation-State (OUP 2020, coedited with Ayesha Asif and Christina Oesterheld).

In collaboration with Max Kramer, I am the editor-in-chief of the journal Dastavezi—The Audio-Visual South Asia. Dastavezi is an international peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal, which seeks to reposition film as a central mode of knowing and thinking about South Asia. Its submissions connect academic texts and audio-visual material to make conceptual or empirical contributions to scholarship on and from South Asia.

I have also filmed, edited, and produced six documentary films on topics such as the alleged forced conversion of Hindu women to Islam in Sindh, the life-worlds of Pakistani Hindu refugees in India, and the sacrificial rites amongst the Devapujak-Vagri community in Karachi. My latest film, The Toxic Reigns of Resentment (2019), deals with the culture of resentment in today’s politics. The film features interviews with Wendy Brown, Rahel Jaeggi, and Peter Sloterdijk, among others.

I had visiting appointments at several universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Hebrew University.