Pakistan Conference

Over the past 15 years, the Center for South Asian Studies Pakistan Conference has brought together participants from Pakistan and from around the world whose research engages with Pakistan, convening them at the University of Michigan. This gathering has become a vibrant forum for cross-cultural exchange, collaborative inquiry, and transformative scholarship that transcends geographical boundaries. The conference presents a new theme annually and has explored diverse topics in history, art, architecture, anthropology, film, language, journalism, religion, and other disciplines, enabling participants to engage deeply with Pakistan’s rich academic and cultural landscapes.

2025 | Seeing Pakistan

This conference brought our focus on Pakistani culture as it interacts with the processes of seeing and being seen. How do countries, peoples, and cultures come to be seen in a global framework? How might the shared qualities of sight and vision unite experiences as disparate as the art museum, the social media site, and the movie theater?

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2024 | Undoing Linguistic Hegemony: Rethinking Belonging and Identity Through and Beyond Urdu

2023 | The Country and The City in Pakistan

Bringing together scholars researching Pakistan’s diverse rural and urban contexts spanning its different regions, this conference explores the interrelationship between the urban and the rural by centering marginalized and minoritized people’s struggles for rights, and by unpacking the structures of feeling and moral economies which continue to frame their articulations of alternative political imaginaries, and strategies of claim-making.

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2022 | Trade Networks, Economy, and Sovereignty

2021 | Religious Landscapes

This conference explored the relationship between religion, identity, historical networks and sacred landscapes to understand the formation of religious thought and practice in Pakistan. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this conference aimed to cultivate a discussion of transnationalism, sectarianism, marginality, inter and intra-religious dynamics.

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2019 | Spaces of Capital

2018 | Movement, Migration, and Borders

This multidisciplinary conference brought together academics, activists, journalists, and artists from Pakistan, Europe, Bangladesh, and the United States in a discussion of the global and mobile realities of Pakistan and its people, and the histories and trajectories of Pakistani diasporas to Aboriginal Australia, the Arabian Gulf, Europe, and North America.

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2017 | Gender & Sexuality

Gender in analytic discourse is either taken as the sole purview of a niche—that of feminist scholars—or, in the late Sharmila Rage’s terms, simply “tacked on” as an afterthought. Through a conversation between artists, activists, and academics, conference attendess attempted to understand the role of gender in shaping various aspects of contemporary life in Pakistan.

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2016 | Infrastructure and Its Discontents

From the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to the jungle of flyovers and underpasses in Lahore, the development of infrastructure in Pakistan has rapidly transformed the country’s landscape. This process has been accompanied by both critique and approval within Pakistani society. Hence, this counference sought answers to questions surrounding both the desire for and rejection of infrastructure.

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