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

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. 2023. "Accessing Value in Lahore’s Waste Infrastructures." Ethnos 88 (3): 533-553.
Butt, Waqas H. 2019. "Beyond the Abject: Caste and the Organization of Work in Pakistan's Waste Economy." International Labor and Working-Class History 95: 18-33.
Butt, Waqas H. 2019. "The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai." Anthropological Quarterly 92 (4): 1273-1282.
Butt, Waqas H. 2017. "Distributing Destruction: Construction, Waste and Atmospheres in Lahore." City 21 (5): 614-621.
Butt, Waqas H., Maira Hayat, Adam Sargent. 2020. "Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia." Anthropology of Work Review 41 (2): 71-75.
Rehman, Nida, Aparna Parikh, Zachary Lamb, Shruti Syal, D. Asher Ghertner, SiddhaRth Menon, Nausheen Anwar, Hira Nabi, Waqas Butt, Malini Ranganathan, Krithika
Srinivasan, Harshavardhan Bhat, Anthony Powis, Nikhil Anand. 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. (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