Hadia Akhtar Khan

Hadia is a feminist and economic anthropologist. Her research focuses on migration, the family and agrarian change. She also edits Jamhoor, a magazine of South Asian politics and culture. Her current book project, Plastic Patriarchy: Migration and Family in Rural in Pakistan, explores how people reconsolidate the patriarchal family in migrant-sending communities. Against perspectives that see patriarchy as a rigid relic of the past, she argues that the fluidity of patriarchy allows for its renovation and persistence over time, making it a central node through which capitalism develops. This research is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Her dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize at the Institute of South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley. This research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Social Science and Humanities Research Council.