The Department of Humanities & Social Sciences is pleased to host Dr. Alia Amirali's talk, "Domestic Workers as Political Subjects."

Dr. Alia Amirali, Lecturer in Gender Studies at Quaid-e-Azam University, and political organizer with the Left, presents a critical examination of domestic workers in Pakistan. This talk challenges conventional portrayals by highlighting the political agency and everyday realities of Islamabad's working-class women, exploring their nuanced responses to exploitation and their engagement with power structures beyond the domestic sphere.

Abstract:

Domestic service in Pakistan- together with those who perform it- are ubiquitous yet largely invisible in mainstream discourses. When they do appear, domestic workers are presented either as helpless victims of torture and abuse, or as individual heroes valiantly fighting their oppression through participation in 'skills development' and 'poverty reduction' programs. They almost never appear as political subjects, that is, as subjects who are actively engaged with relations and structures of power and who have lives both within and outside the realm of domestic service as well as organized politics. 

In this talk, I draw on my doctoral research with Islamabad's domestic workers- most of whom are low-caste working-class women living in Islamabad's katchi abadis- to present snippets of their everyday lives and political subjectivities. In particular, I focus on their descriptions of the domestic service relationship and how these subjects make sense of and respond to deeply unequal and exploitative relations within and beyond the realm of domestic service.

Bio: 

Dr. Alia Amirali is a lecturer in Gender Studies at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, and a political organizer with the Left.