Ali Nobil Ahmad
Ali Nobil Ahmad
Doctor of Philosophy
Researcher/Consultant in Migration/ Ecology / Media
@Heinrich Böll Foundation, African Migration Hub, Nairobi
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37
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September 2009 - present
Publications
Publications (37)
This article is a critical reflection on the question of whether Twitter is a useful tool for journalists, based on close observation of The Guardian. It begins with a practice-based anthropology. Focusing on coverage of the G20 protests and other activities in 2009, it demonstrates that Twitter is a useful marketing and research tool for newspaper...
This article explores human smuggling's consequences through a study of London's Pakistani immigrant economy, paying particular attention to the labour process and its experiential dimensions.The latter are unpacked in empirical context with due reference to literatures on illegal migration, as well as more recent writings on employment and `precar...
Ali Nobil Ahmad and Hasan H. Karrar explore ways to establish the relationship between capitalism, nature and socialist alternatives in Asia's most populous sub-Himalayan states, such as India and Pakistan. A focus on South Asia can be justified by the fact that the manner in which capitalist modernity acts upon nature is both temporally and spatia...
This introductory article identifies some of the conceptual issues and themes worth considering in the pursuit of a broader and deeper knowledge about the cinema in Pakistan than currently exists. It does so with reference to several of the papers in this special issue and a number of recently published scholarly works on culture and politics in th...
This article explores the relationship between infrastructure, uneven development, and displacement in Pakistan’s “Southern Punjab”. It focuses on three historical episodes spanning the colonial era to the present: (1) agricultural colonisation during the colonial/early post‐colonial period; (2) the Great Indus Flood of 2010; and (3) contemporary i...
As humanity enters a new era of climate‐induced unpredictability, research into the role of religion in shaping perceptions of, and responses to disaster will become increasingly important. This is particularly true of South Asia, which contains dense populations certain to be adversely affected by climate change. This contribution explores the way...
This volume sets out to explore the dialectic relating agriculture, crisis and conflict, and attempts to expand the knowledge on these interactions. Part 1 of the volume (chapters 1-6) discusses thematic issues and methodological approaches to understanding the intersection of agriculture, crisis and conflict. Part 2 (chapters 7-20) provides case s...
This paper explores shifting valuations involved in the production of »natural resources« in a range of empirical contexts situated in the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and East Africa. Drawing on several thematic strands from an ever-growing literature on the subject of resources, it reflects discussions of the ZMO research Group, "The Pol...
Ali Nobil Ahmad is a Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and Assistant Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where he teaches history at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2014 he was Madeleine Haas Visiting Assistant Professor of South Asian Studies at Brandeis University in Boston. His rese...
This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘fail...
Back cover marketing blurb: This book collates a comprehensive range of fascinating essays by leading authors on film from across the Muslim world. Responding to political and theoretical misconceptions about Islam and Muslim culture, it covers North African, Arab and Asian cinemas in a rich series of industry histories, single film studies and det...
This article investigates the significance of informal economic activity and corruption in journalism as a profession in the Pakistani context. It begins with a sketch of the political economy of the media at the world level, focusing on the ways in which its structuring under contemporary neoliberalism produces and draws upon macro (global) forms...
This article investigates the significance of informal economic activity and corruption in journalism as a profession in the Pakistani context. It begins with a sketch of the political economy of the media at the world level, focusing on the ways in which its structuring under contemporary neoliberalism produces and draws upon macro (global) forms...
This article is a historical overview of cinema in Pakistan. It pays special attention to the horror film, tracing its fragmentary early history and development during the industry's heyday in the 1960s through to its contemporary re-emergence since the 1990s. It begins with a contextual sketch of 'Lollywood's' early history and the crippling legac...
El presente artículo plantea, en su parte inicial, una crítica constructiva a las teorías sobre la inmigración y subraya los problemas implícitos en las suposiciones de la teoría del capital/red social y en la investigación sobre las economías étnicas y el "transnacionalismo". De estas teorías el autor adopta los postulados que considera más intere...
This paper explores the importance of sexuality in international labour migration from Pakistan, paying special attention to masculine desire and subjectivity (driving forces in sending contexts), and to the bodily experience of travel, transit and the labour process (consequences at destination). The relationships between these two aspects of the...
This article explores the short- and medium-term labour market consequences of human smuggling for migrants at destination within the context of Pakistani migration to London. It questions the pessimistic picture painted in some recent academic and journalistic accounts of the experience of 'illegality', and argues that the context of reception doe...