Critical Hydropolitics
Political Ecology
Environmental Humanities
Environmental and Sustainability Studies 
South Asian Areas Studies

I am a human geographer interested in exploring material implications of stories. I am deeply invested in challenging the fact-fiction binary to understand the worldmaking potentials of scientific or imaginative narratives.   

My current research focuses on the multiple ways global narratives of climate change are entangled with the everyday practices, politics, and poetics of survival in the canal colonies of Punjab, Pakistan. At the intersections of political ecology, environmental humanities, and literary geographies, my research traces the history of world's largest contiguous irrigation system in Punjab to understand the challenges it faces in the wake of global environmental crisis and water scarcity. I explore the interconnections between the material production of canal colony villages and a new aesthetics of Nature Poetry in Urdu literature. I argue that natural aesthetics in Urdu literature and spatial and social politics of canal colonies and irrigation infrastructure are two sides of the same phenomenon of colonial modernization. As contemporary global crisis threatens this colonial hydrosocial arrangement in the canal colonies, a new aesthetics and mobility of survival is taking shape that could potentially provide alternative and more equitable imaginaries of the future.

My interdisciplinary research is built upon my eclectic methodology that combines archival research with ethnography and literary analysis to explore the entangled material and fictional worlds.