Mother Karachi and the Mother

by Hussain Bux Mallah

Rent Me by Benny Lin/Flickr

Karachi is often called the mother of the poor and the indigent – she will feed and nurture those that reach her. Upon entering the city you are welcomed by billboards announcing ‘To Let’ almost inviting you to come and stay. Though it is quite another matter that you can’t find any public toilets in case of need!

I met Jumman first in 2012 when our team interviewed him as part of a longitudinal study on food security. He reminisced fondly about the time when mother Karachi had been kind to him. He had arrived a few years before, got a job through a relative, got married and regularly sent money home to his wife and his natural mother in their village in Shaheed Benazirabad. But then his fortune turned,

The Government’s Obligation to Uphold the Right to Maternal Health

by Sara Malkani

Photo credit: Patient with nurse at Koohi Goth Women's Hospital/ Dr. Sarwan

WHO estimates the rate of maternal mortality in Pakistan at 170 per 100,000 lives births. In developed countries the figure is around 11 per 100,000.

The high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity in Pakistan are not simply a reflection of inadequate resources or poverty, or lack of priorities on the part of the government. They also constitute violations of the fundamental right to health guaranteed under the Constitution of Pakistan. The right to health does not mean that everyone has a right to be healthy. Nor does it mean that the state is responsible for every death or injury. Instead, the right to health means that governments must generate conditions in which everyone can be as healthy as possible.[1]

The Developmental Role of the Central Bank

by Asad Sayeed

Photo credit: insignificantnobody/flickr

‘States vs. Markets’ was the buzzword for many of us studying economics or politics in the 1980s and 1990s. As the wall collapsed in Berlin – signaling the end of the cold war – the (false) triumphalism of markets was trumpeted. In time, the academic debate also shifted from this simple binary to give way to more heterodox ways of framing issues relevant to policy and social change.

Engaging Disciplines

by Haris Gazdar

This blog is an excerpt from a talk given at the meeting of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies on 4 April 2015 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

I wish to speak about two aspects of conducting applied social science research on the city by reflecting on some work on Karachi that I have been involved with in the last few years, hopefully as a way of thinking about the broader question of engagement in the production of knowledge.  Of the two things I want to speak about the first is methodological.  I will show, through illustration, the value of working across disciplines on urban themes. The second is political, about how actions and actors would like to make use of knowledge and knowledge producers, and how this is both energizing and frustrating. 

Bringing real change for women

by Ayesha Khan

February 12, 1983, protesters being attacked by the police at the famous WAF demonstration in Lahore. Photo credit: Rahat Ali Dar

These thoughts were recently part of a talk I gave at IBA to a class of undergraduate Social Science students on issues in women and development.

The 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing, recognized that women’s empowerment was a social justice issue, valuable in its own right and not primarily a tool to further the goals of development. Feminists from around the world had been lobbying for years within the UN, their own governments and with other international organizations, to have their language of social transformation, the goal of feminism, adopted by the Conference.

Roma left us!

by Hussain Bux Mallah

Many ethnographers believe that a critical analysis of one’s own position in society and with respect to one’s research subjects is a good place to start work. My work at the Collective on social exclusion and marginalization spurred me to examine my own family’s narrative about its past and its position in the hierarchy of occupational and kinship groups in its surroundings.

Hamza Alavi can lead you out of crisis

by Hassan Zaib Abbasi

Hamza Alavi (1921 - 2003) Photo Credit: http://tinyurl.com/qf4b2hb

Commentators in electronic and print media churn out analysis after analysis: dissecting events, building their theses, and offering speculative explanations of political happenings. One need only catch a glimpse of a television channel and it becomes clear that Pakistan is in crisis. Not because the state faces imminent danger of collapse but because of the frequency of seemingly unexplainable events whose true meaning always remains just slightly out of grasp despite, or perhaps because of, the efforts of numerous “analysts”.