SARC Event: Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy

Conveners: South Asia Research Cluster (SARC), Wolfson College

Speaker: Dr. Afiya Shehrbano Zia 

Discussant: Professor Sneha Krishnan

Dr. Afiya Shehrbano Zia is a feminist scholar and author of Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? (2018, Sussex Academic Press) and Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994, ASR). She has authored over a dozen essays for edited volumes and peer reviewed journals. Afiya is an active member of the Women’s Action Forum – a secular women’s rights organisation in Pakistan. She teaches at the Habib University, Pakistan and at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Professor Zia will present a paper on Piety as a Stabiliser of Patriarchy, and Sexual Subversion of the Islamic Gendered Order in Pakistan connecting the themes of her book with current governance in Pakistan.

Professor Sneha Krishnan will share her reflections and comments on the book. She is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She is interested in how histories of colonialism and imperial afterlives shape the experience of childhood. She is currently writing a book about women’s hostels in Southern India, and has ongoing projects on childhood and geopolitics, as well as on gender and archival practice.