about

Naveeda Khan is Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is working on a book on the July Uprising in Bangladesh in 2024, with a focus on student activism against authoritarianism and the aftermath of the fall of a government. Her questions have to do with political voice, how one knows one has one, how one gains it, and how one stands to lose it. She kept a blog post while in Dhaka during the uprising and has co-written with legal advocate Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury and anthropologist Shrobona Shafique Dipti several contextualizing pieces on the role of the university in seeding student opposition to the previous regime in Bangladesh (see menu under "research and writing" tab for these).

Naveeda also researches river life and climate change in Bangladesh. She received the Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship to train herself in the environmental sciences and humanities to undertake this research. Her book River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke 2023) examines how people live with moving land within the Brahmaputra/Jamuna River: what such physical dynamism does to feelings of belonging, conceptions of property, mechanics of living together and imaginations of the future. The book won the Victor Turner Writing Prize from the Society of Humanistic Anthropology. A second book In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham 2023, open access) explores how Bangladesh navigates the UN sponsored negotiations over global climate policy, using it as a vantage to understand the shape of a politics labeled as Global South at this moment in time. She also looks at youth participation in the negotiations. Naveeda is completing a third manuscript titled "The Senses of Climate: Provisioning and Prophesying in the Jamuna Chars." In it she studies the forms (visual, literary, bodily, oneiric...) by which climate change is mediated to those living on the Jamuna Chars and the analytics they deploy for deciphering these.

For her doctoral and postdoctoral work, Naveeda worked on religious difference and conflict within urban neighborhoods in Pakistan. Her 2012 book Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke and Orient Blackswan) attempted to recast the framework for studying Pakistan from one of lack ("insufficiently imagined") to one of plenitude by showing that it was conceived as a place of experimentation over what it is to be a modern Muslim. The book also showed how this way of posing the question made it vulnerable to becoming a question of who is a Muslim or who counts as such for the purposes of participating in the nation-state. Muslim Becoming won the American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize.

Naveeda has long been keen to bridge gaps among regional scholarship that too narrowly take the perspectives of nation states (see her submission to the Annual Review of Anthropology and her co-edited special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies with literary scholar Firdous Azim). She is also interested in bringing philosophy into productive conversation with anthropology theory and ethnography (see her "Kant and Anthropology" review article). On this theme, she is writing a short book of essays titled "Schelling and the Romantic Method." Her interest in how technology sits alongside people's various strivings, for political voice, a secure life in the face of environmental devastation, and religious self-perfection led her to serve as co-organizer of a Andrew Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on "Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data" (2019-2022) with her Hopkins colleagues Veena Das and Jeremy Greene. She continues to strive to be a decent photographer.