Mahvish Ahmad

Biography

Mahvish Ahmad is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics. Previously, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape; Visiting Faculty at Quaid-e-Azam University; and a Teaching Fellow at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She also spent several years working as a journalist in Pakistan and co-founded Tanqeed (with Madiha Tahir), a bilingual English/Urdu magazine of the left in Pakistan.

Ahmad studies state violence and the intellectual and political labour of movements targeted in repression. As part of this work, Ahmad co-founded Revolutionary Papers (with Chana Morgenstern and Koni Benson), a transnational project that investigates twentieth century periodicals as sites of critical aesthetics, politics and counter-infrastructures.

She is also a trustee of the South Asian Research and Resource Centre, an Islamabad-based archive of Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements established by Ahmad Saleem. She also co-convenes Archives of the Disappeared: Discipline and Method Amidst Ruin at the University of Cambridge (with Mezna Qato, Yael Navaro and Chana Morgenstern), an initiative for the study and documentation of communities, social movements, spaces, lifeworlds, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.

Her publications include Movement Texts as Anti-Colonial Theory (Sociology, 2022); Musāfir in Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (Routledge, 2022); and ‘Activism, knowledge and publishing: some views from Pakistan and Afghanistan’ (with J. Caron) (South Asian History and Culture, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016).

Ahmad earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge.

Born in 1982 in Denmark, she lives and works between Lahore and London.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023