Faculty Associate
lalaie[at]yorku.ca
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology, York University
Research Keywords:
Race; racism and racialization; globalization; diaspora; affect and embodiment; labour studies; feminist studies; transnational Muslim cultures
Research Region(s):
Pakistan, South Asia
Research Diaspora(s):
Pakistani Diaspora, South Asian Diaspora
Lalaie Ameeriar’s research examines how histories of systemic racism shape contemporary experiences of health, care and belonging across diasporic and transnational communities. Her work brings together medical anthropology, labour studies, feminist theory and the study of affect and embodiment to analyze how institutions manage difference through bodily regulation, sensory norms and forms of intimate governance.
Her first book, Downwardly Global: Women, Work and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2017), draws on multi-sited fieldwork in Lahore, Karachi, London and Toronto. The book investigates how immigrant women navigate precarious labour markets and how multicultural institutions reproduce inequality through everyday practices of evaluation and care. Downwardly Global received Honourable Mentions from both the Association for Asian American Studies and the National Women’s Studies Association.
Her current monograph, Carry Me Gently: Maternal Harm and the Afterlife of Care (under revision with Duke University Press), explores how birthing people endure medical neglect and institutional abandonment within contemporary health systems in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, the project combines ethnography, institutional analysis and narrative writing to examine how care persists through grief, loss and structural vulnerability. Publications from this research include articles forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, along with creative nonfiction pieces in American Ethnologist, Rogue Agent, Ricepaper MagazineThe Sun Literary Magazine.
Her newest project, What We Inherit: Racialized Care Work during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic, analyzes the experiences and memory work of nurses, personal support workers and birth workers who sustained essential infrastructures of care while navigating heightened risk and limited institutional protection. Through oral history, digital storytelling and community partnerships, this research examines how frontline care workers generate counterarchives and alternative visions of health, safety and social worth.
Ameeriar has held fellowships at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Goldsmiths, University of London.