Waqas Butt
Affiliate, Centre for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Areas of interest
- Caste
- Labour
- Waste
- Infrastructure
- Informal economics
- Urbanization
- The environment
Biography
Main Bio
Waqas H. Butt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty in the School of Cities and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the political life of infrastructure in contemporary Pakistan. His first project extended these interests through a study of waste, caste, labour, and urbanization across Pakistan, with a focus on Lahore and urban Punjab. More recently, Butt has started a project examining the socio-ecological transformation wrought by infrastructural interventions across the Indus River Basin and what those transformations reveal about politics as much in Pakistan and South Asia and across the Global North and Global South.
Select publications
Books
- Butt, Waqas H. 2023. Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructures in Urban Pakistan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Articles
- Butt, Waqas H. (with Aparna Parikh, Nida Rehman, Nausheen Anwar, Nikhil Anand, Malini Ranganthan, Siddharth Menon, Shruti Syal, Anthony Powis, Harshavardhan Bhat, Asher Ghertner, Hira Nabi, Zachary Lamb, Krithika Srinivasan). 2023. “South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 47 (4): 667-687.
- Butt, Waqas H. 2023. “Accessing Value in Lahore’s Waste Infrastructures.” Ethnos 88 (3): 533-53
- Butt, Waqas H. 2020. “Waste Intimacies: Caste and the Unevenness of Life in Urban Pakistan.” American Ethnologist 47 (3): 234-248.
Awards & recognition
- 2015 American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Short-term Lecturing and Research Fellowship
- 2014 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Dissertational Research Grant