SWGI
5:00 PM
VC Faculty Lounge, Academic Block, LUMS
Speaker(s)
Dr. Sarah Suhail

In this discussion, Dr. Suhail shares the life stories of women who have escaped bonded labor in Sindh, describing their conditions of carceral labor and their strategies and tools of escape. This discussion is part of a larger project that explores the tools and strategies of resistance used by people relegated to the margins of society by the social conception of their womanness as a form of loss that is compounded by their religious, caste, and class-based status. The aim is to learn from the life stories of landless free/d women to deconstruct the operating gender regime and regimes of monopolized social, economic, and political resources by elite classes that reveal the underlying and pervasive structure that deems certain lives less than human and disposable. This is an intervention attempts to shift epistemic authority to grassroots voices on how minoritisation, exclusion, and disposability of certain people lies at the heart of a particular Pakistani Nationalist project, not unlike the competing majoritarian nationalisms in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar with their distinctive histories and attendant violent expressions. At the same time these are stories of hope about comrades who come together in the worst of circumstances and organize their own escapes and the escape of others in their communities.