Sana Malik

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’s Rights in Urban Pakistan, explores the Women’s [Aurat] March in Pakistan as a site where contending forms of kinship, political solidarity, and media cultures emerge and extend into women’s 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

• “Tales from the Field: Notes on Homecoming.” In “Emergent Conversation 28: Solidarity for Anthropologists.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online. (2026)
• “Coming of (R)age in Pakistan: The Event and Everyday Life.” Feminist Theory. (2025)
• “First Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies, and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online. (2025)
• “The Rise of Aunties in Pakistani Politics.” Sapiens. (2024)
• Khan, Ali, Sana Malik, and Manal Ahmad. “‘Skill vs. Scale’: The Transformation of Traditional Occupations in the Androon Shehr.” 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 Profile

• ORCID
• Google Scholar

Curriculum Vitae