Our Faculty

headshot of Sana  Malik

Sana Malik

Assistant Professor

Anthropology

Biography

Sana Malik is a cultural anthropologist interested in questions of gender, rights, power, and generational transformations in urban South Asia and the Muslim world. Her current book project, Gender and Generation: Activist Assemblages and Women鈥檚 Rights in Urban Pakistan, explores the Women鈥檚 [Aurat] March in Pakistan as a site where contending forms of kinship, political solidarity, and media cultures emerge and extend into women鈥檚 intimate and political lives beyond the event. Her second project, Marriage/Divorce Pakistani Style, is a multi-sited exploration of the life-making practices of single women in the South Asian diaspora as they navigate racialized, anti-immigrant discourses and institutions at home and abroad. 

Malik is currently developing a Media Ethnography Lab in the Anthropology Department to support multimodal, collaborative, and public-facing ethnographic research.

Publications

  • 鈥淭ales from the Field: Notes on Homecoming.鈥� In 鈥淓mergent Conversation 28: Solidarity for Anthropologists.鈥� PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online. (2026)
  • 鈥淐oming of (R)age in Pakistan: The Event and Everyday Life.鈥� Feminist Theory. (2025)
  • 鈥淔irst Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies, and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South.鈥� PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online. (2025)
  • 鈥淭he Rise of Aunties in Pakistani Politics.鈥� Sapiens. (2024)
  • Khan, Ali, Sana Malik, and Manal Ahmad. 鈥溾�楽kill vs. Scale鈥�: The Transformation of Traditional Occupations in the Androon Shehr.鈥� In Urban Pakistan: Frames for Imagining and Reading Urbanism, edited by Khalid W. Bajwa. Oxford University Press. (2013)

Education

  • PhD, Emory University
  • MA, Emory University
  • MA, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • BSc, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

Research Interests

  • Political and feminist anthropology
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Kinship, friendship and relatedness
  • Feminist media and oral histories
  • South Asia, Muslim world

Teaching Interests

  • Gender and politics in South Asia
  • Anthropology and media
  • Feminist ethnographies
  • Gender, culture and media

Research Profile

Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae for Sana Malik