Congratulations to Dr. Sabeen Kazmi, who successfully defended her doctoral thesis "'Drawing' Out Colonial Threads: Property, Law, and Inequality," on September 5, 2025.
This dissertation examines the enduring influence of colonial property laws on land, governance, and inequality in Pakistan, centering on Qayyumabad, a katchi abadi (informal settlement) in Karachi. It situates Qayyumabad’s struggles with criminalization, securitization, and displacement within a broader critique of how colonial logics structure both urban dispossession in South Asia and the racialized academic’s experience in Western universities. By asking how do colonial logics embedded in Pakistan’s property and land laws manifest in the criminalization, securitization, and displacement of Qayyumabad and following with a question about how a multi-modal decolonial praxis can challenge colonial systems of knowledge and governance, she employs an innovative multi-modal approach. This approach integrates Socio-legal analysis of colonial and postcolonial property law, Ethnographic engagement with Qayyumabad residents, Artistic practices (painting, poetry, fictional storytelling, photography) and Archival research (statutes, news reports, community records). The dissertation demonstrates that decoloniality must extend beyond theory into practice. By bridging law, art, and community, the work highlights new possibilities for socio-legal research and for envisioning frameworks of South Asian liberation and global solidarity.
Co-supervisors Professor Kamari Clarke and Professor Kerry Taylor would like to thank the members of the examining committee, including Professor Michelle Brown (External Examiner, University of Tennessee, Department of Sociology), Professor Brett Story (Internal/External Examiner, Cinema Studies Institute), committee member, Professor John Borrows (Faculty of Law), as well as the Defence Chair, Professor Jun Zhang (Department of Geography and Planning).
Please join us in congratulating Sabeen Kazmi!