Akhtar Khan Helping Grow Agrarian Studio
Postdoctoral associate and Future of Work fellow Hadia Akhtar Khan is developing programming and conferences.
Future of Work Fellow Hadia Akhtar Khan recently described her work at ILR.
What Future of Work project are you working on?
I am working with Associate Professor Sarah Besky to develop programming for the Agrarian Studio.
How would you describe your role in the project?
My role is to bring together Agrarian Studies scholars at Cornell and beyond, by organizing conferences, workshops and colloquia. For example, our next conference is titled “Agrarian Studies, Climate Change and the Future of Work” and aims to build an interdisciplinary conversation on how work is changing.
Why are you drawn to this work?
As an anthropologist, I am interested in how the meaning of labor changes in contexts of economic restructuring. Through collaborations with other scholars in the Agrarian Studio, I hope to further develop my analysis of labor by focusing on changes in class, gender, kinship and caste relations in agrarian contexts.
How have your academic and other experiences prepared you for this role?
I am interested in the anthropology of capitalism, feminism and agrarian political economy. I have a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, Economics and French from the University of Toronto, a master’s degree in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto. The most important part of my training was spending a year and a half in two villages in Pakistan doing an ethnography of how men’s migration to Malaysia and the Gulf is transforming family, land, labor and caste relations.
Beyond your contributions to the Future of Work initiative, tell us about you!
I am an editor for a fantastic left magazine called Jamhoor, a media platform focused on centering critical, marginalized and often-censored perspectives from South Asia and its diasporas.