Dr Yasmeen Arif

British Academy Postdoctoral Researcher

Unit Affiliation 

Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology

yasmeen.arif@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Yasmeen is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. Her research project, ‘Plant trees, save Lahore": afforestation as hope and political project in Pakistan’, explores the many meanings attached to tree planting in Pakistan. While large-scale afforestation has been a key government policy since 2014, Yasmeen’s project sets out to trace how planting trees in Pakistan also links to religious, nationalist, technocratic and political discourses, in an effort to understand the on-the-ground popularity and power of tree planting. As part of this project, Yasmeen co-runs the Planting Trees reading and working group.

Yasmeen completed her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2023 where she won the Robert Parkin prize for ethnography. This followed an undergraduate in Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University.

Yasmeen’s research interests span gender, race, the anthropology of Islam, and urban climate justice.

Working within feminist and postcolonial methodologies, Yasmeen is interested in critically exploring how people work within constraining structures towards more equitable futures, and how these constraining structures affect what forms of justice are considered to be possible or even imaginable. Her current areas of interest include urban food sovereignty, the intersection of religiosity and environmentalism, and abolitionist responses to urban climate breakdown. Methodological commitments to feminist scholarly praxis include research interests in the production of knowledge, including methods of co-production and writing as method. 

Her current postdoctoral research investigates the social, cultural, political and economic meanings attached to planting trees in urban centres in Pakistan. It is part of her wider work on Muslim Climate Futures, which examines how Muslims and Islamic communities navigate the unequal impacts of the climate crisis.

Beyond her postdoctoral project she has focused on understandings of, and responses to, anti-Muslim racism in the UK. Her doctoral research was based in dormitory-style hostels in Lahore. Working with rural-to-urban female migrants, she explored how women aspired towards a successful modern and urbanised femininity while simultaneously preparing for unknown futures.