I study the intersection between environmental change, economic transformation, and social movements. This has involved working with national and transnational social movements geared towards food, energy, labour and climate justice. One of the key objectives of my work is to recognise communities and social movements as authors of concepts and theory for alternate trajectories of local and global development. I am the co-founder of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) South Asia Collective, which aims to foster dialogue between scholars and rural social movements in South Asia. I am on the editorial team for Agrarian South Network’s Research Bulletin and Jamhoor magazine.
PhD, Development Studies. SOAS, London
MA, Sociology. Columbia University, New York
BA, Social Sciences. Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore
The overarching question that drives my research is: how have social movements shaped global trajectories of environmental and economic change under contemporary capitalism?
My current book project, The Agrarian Question in West Punjab, investigates how the trajectories of agrarian change in North India in the colonial and postcolonial period shaped the development of agrarian movements past and present. This work engages with movement literature, ethnography, and life history interviews to bridge the gap between literatures on agrarian change and agrarian politics.
In my work with the Alternate Law Collective, I am developing digital tools that capture how communities have developed critiques of and adapted to large-scale hydrological transformations designed and funded by multinational development banks. The work aims to build on alternative life-worlds that are disrupted by these projects and now find themselves at the forefront of struggles for climate justice. I also engaged in processes of global policy reform, which includes the place of food, energy, labour, debt and public investment in a just transition. I have also written on rural-urban transformations, popular culture, and global agrarian politics.
Peer-reviewed articles:
2021 Rashid, Hashim bin, Kadirgamar, Ahilan, and Shah, Amod, “Contesting Agrarian Markets in South Asia: Farmers’ Movements, Cooperatives, and Alternative Visions.” Millennial Asia. Vol. 12, Issue 3: 277-297
2018 Rashid, Hashim. “Remembering Ghazi Ilam Din Shaheed: The Construction of Memory, Religious Affect and Blasphemy in the Muslim Public Sphere in Colonial Panjab and Contemporary Pakistan.” Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 7/2017, S. 201-225. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
2024 Rashid, Hashim. “Climate, National and Agrarian Questions in Contemporary Farmers’ Movements in Pakistan.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. (Under Review)
Book Chapters:
2023 Rashid, Hashim bin; Ahmed, Mahvish, and Saleem, Ahmed, “On Progressive Papers in Pakistan” In: Towards a People’s History of Pakistan. (Bloomsbury Publishing). Kamran Asdar Ali and A. Ahmed, eds.
2021 Rashid, Hashim bin and Moulvi, Zainab (2021), “The case of LDA City: How a public- private partnership fractured farmers’ resistance in Lahore.” in Marginalization, Contestation and Change in South Asian Cities, ed. Nida Kirmani. (Karachi, Oxford University Press.)
2020 Rashid, Hashim. (2020) “Resisting rural dispossession and displacement: Peasant pathways to climate justice.” in Climate Justice and Migration: Mobility, Development and Displacement in the Global South, ed. Ali Nobil Ahmed. Henrich Boll Foundation.
2016 Rashid, Hashim bin and Khan, Sher (2016). “Goonda Raj: caste and criminality in Punjabi Cinema.” in Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan, eds. Khan, Ali and Nobil, Ali Ahmed. (Karachi, Oxford University Press).