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2024 – Biodata of the trainers

ORGANIZERS

Professor Dr S. Akbar Zaidi is the Executive Director of the IBA. He is a renowned political economist with an experience of four decades of teaching and research in Pakistan and abroad. His areas of interest in research include political economy, development, the social sciences, and history. He completed his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2009. Prior to his appointment as the Executive Director, IBA Karachi in 2020, Dr. Zaidi served as Professor at Columbia University, New York and held a joint position at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), from 2010 to 2020, when he became the Executive Director of the IBA. Dr. Zaidi has written numerous books, and over 80 academic articles in international journals and as chapters in books.

Dr. Rémy Delage is a geographer who focuses on the role of religious movements, such as pilgrimages, ritual and political processions, and vernacular tourism in shaping places and territorial belonging in India and Pakistan. His PhD in 2004 involved a detailed study of a Hindu mass religious gathering in South India, with a special emphasis on the circulatory aspect of pilgrimage and the pilgrim’s journey as a significant experience of mobility. From 2008 to 2013, he took part in the French Study Group on Sindh led by Michel Boivin, a multidisciplinary research project that examined processes of social and religious change in a Sufi pilgrimage center, Sehwan Sharif. He specifically looked at the interplay between the manifestations of a cult of saints, the formation of local society, composite modes of religiosity, and ritual politics. Rémy Delage co-edited two books, one with Michel Boivin, titled “Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers” (Routledge, London, 2016), and another with Mathieu Claveyrolas, Territoires du religieux dans les mondes indiens. Parcourir, mettre en scène, franchir (Edition EHESS, Collection Purusartha, Paris, 2016). He served as the co-director of the CEIAS from 2019 to 2022 and has been the director of the Master’s degree program in Asian Studies at EHESS since 2018.

Tooba Khan is a Senior Executive – Marketing and Outreach at IBA Karachi’s Talent Hunt Program. With a background in the Marketing and Communications department, she is a skilled digital marketer. She is currently pursuing an M.Phil in Mass Communication from the University of Karachi. Her academic journey includes a Master’s in Mass Communication, focusing on Electronic Media, along with a keen interest in documentary filmmaking, which complements her practical marketing expertise.

Dr Michel Boivin received his initial training with a PhD in the history of the contemporary Muslim world (Sorbonne University) and in Arabic and Persian. He completed his training with an HDR (Habilitation to supervise Research) in Ethnology (Paris X-Nanterre University). A former co-director of the CEIAS (CNRS-EHESS), he is currently   Emeritus Director of Research at the CNRS and a member of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Himalayas (CESAH). His research mainly focuses on the varied interactions between Islam, especially Sufism and Shiism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. After working intensively on the issue of authority and transmission of religious knowledge, he shifted to topics about the material culture of religions. He is involved in a research project on the devotional cultures of the Indus Valley, straddling the Pak-Indian borders. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Sindhi Studies (Brill) and Critical Pakistan Studies (Cambridge University Press). His latest books are with Charu Gidwani, An Anthology of Sindhi Sufi Poetry as Preserved by the Sindhis of India, edited and translated by, (Adviksham Publisher, 2024); Devotion, Religious Authority and Social Structures in Sindh: Khojas, Vaniyos and Faqirs (Brill Publisher, 2024); and with Manoël Pénicaud (Eds), Inter-religious Practices and Saint Veneration in the Muslim World. Khidr/Khizr from the Middle East to South Asia (Routledge, 2023). He works with Matthew A. Cook on a Handbook of Sindhi Studies (Routledge).

Aqsa Jawed is a Lecturer at the Department of Economics, School of Economics and Social Sciences at IBA, Karachi since 2021. She was the Co-Principal investigator for the Karachi Urban Resilience Project that looked at the migrant population in two informal settlements of Karachi. Prior to this, she was working in the development sector on a randomized control trial in Karachi and has led the design of com-munity-based interventions to promote health care, social cohesion, and women empowerment at the grassroots level. She completed her Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Warwick in 2018 on the commonwealth scholarship and BSc (Hons.) in Economics from Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2016.

INVITED SPEAKERS

Mariam Aziz is Asssistant Professort at the Department of Social Sciences (IBA, Karachi). She is a filmmaker, producer, cinematographer and editor whose work ranges from documentary to (digital) commercials and corporate films. She enjoys the process of channelling the visual medium as a platform for social enterprises, brands and organisations with unique and powerful stories to tell. With an MFA in Filmmaking (2014, UT Austin) and 8 years production experience in television, her recent work includes content and storytelling for social awareness, advocacy and non profit organisations such as the Aga Khan University Examination Board, Zindagi Trust, Aahung, and Salt Arts (promoting arts & culture production), as well as talented local start-ups such as STUDIO SERA, Dreamnode Studios, and the Karachi Aeroclub.

Bénédicte Barillé is the Head of Production in the Image and Sound Department at EHESS in Paris. Over the years, she has been assisting researchers and students in creating new narrative forms in the human and social sciences such as film, sound documentaries, and photography. She actively contributes to the advancement of sound writing in research and has organized the Social Sciences and Sound Creation days as part of the Jean Rouch Festival.

Eléonore Boissinot is a French producer and director. She is the co-founder of the documentary production company Dryades Films. She has a background in social sciences from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris X Nanterre, and has also studied documentary direction at Ateliers Varan. Boissinot started her career by collaborating with French researchers in Lebanon and India while studying Hindi. After that, she worked for several production companies before co-founding Dryades Films in 2016 with producer Claire Babany. Since then, they have produced several documentaries that have been featured in festivals across Europe and overseas. Notable productions include “OUT,” a feature-length documentary by Denis Parrot which received awards at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Busan, Warsaw, Fipadoc, and Etoile de la Scam in 2020. It was also broadcasted on various platforms such as Canal+, Ciné+, MDR/ARTE, LCP, RTS, RTBF, BETV, and Amazon Prime. Other documentaries include “PALESTINIAN WOMEN, A GUIDE TO CULTURAL RESISTANCE” by Mariette Auvray which was featured at the Figra Festival, Ciné-Palestine, and Documed Tunisia, and was broadcasted on LCP, ORF, DW, and BBC Arabic. “NIGHTWATCHERS” by Juliette de Marcillac opened the 2023 Visions du Réel International Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland. Boissinot’s first documentary as a director, “THE PATHAN SISTERS,” co-produced with France Télévisions, RTS, and Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, premiered at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival Critics’ Week and was awarded the Premio Zonta Club.

Dr Rémi Boivin is a doctor in sociology and cultural project manager. He defended a thesis at EHESS on the social and urban issues of a music scene in Marseille (Listening to La Plaine. Ecological approach of a musical scene in Marseille, Doctoral thesis in sociology, EHESS, 2020). His researches are focused on cultural scenes and territoriality, urban ecology, cultural and spatial boundaries and public problems. After following an initial training in media studies, he was lecturer at Paris 8 University and Sorbonne Nouvelle, on topics such as “Cultural and creative industries”, “Sociology of Popular music” and “Fieldwork methods in social sciences”. He currently works on a research-creation program at EHESS and takes interest in sound as a tool for research in social sciences. He started to make sound documentaries on local life and urban atmospheres in Marseille and Paris. His main published works ionclude: “Les frontières d’une scène musicale urbaine. Proximité spatiale et distance culturelle au centre-ville de Marseille”, in L’épreuve des frontières sociales (dir. PEDLER E. and FONTAINE M.), Enquête, EHESS Eds, 2022 and “Comment le rap construit-il sa centralité à Marseille ?”, in Marseille : Les batailles du centre-ville (dir. FRANÇOIS C., VACHET K., VALEGEAS F.), Métropolitiques, 2021.

Fanny Dujardin is a PhD student in art theory and a radio author. Since 2019, she has been conducting research for her thesis on sound documentary as “writing with the voices of others” at the PRISM laboratory in Aix-Marseille University. Her research explores the aesthetic, ethical, and political aspects of recording and sound writing from a multidisciplinary perspective. Fanny has taught radio documentary at the CREADOC master’s program in Angoulême and will be teaching literature and cinema at Université Paris Cité in 2024-2025. She received the Longueur d’Ondes festival prize in 2023 for her latest documentary, “Prologue pour un récit d’arrivée” (Prologue for an Arrival Story), which addresses the plight of minors exiled on French territory.

Haya Fatima Iqbal is an Academy and two-time Emmy winning documentary filmmaker based in Pakistan. Through her documentary work, she has covered a range of issues connected with social justice ranging from gender and militancy to climate change and water scarcity. Haya’s storytelling of a 19-year-old honor-killing survivor in the film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness resulted in Pakistan’s parliament passing a law tightening punishment against perpetrators. The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 2016, and the Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2017. In 2019, Haya’s co-produced feature-length documentary Armed With Faith won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Politics & Government Film. The film follows the lives of three men who work to defuse bombs with the police department in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Her work with Humans of New York photo blogger Brandon Stanton resulted in never-heard-before stories from Pakistan reaching the world, including the story of a woman named Syeda Ghulam Fatima who is working to end bonded labor in the country. Her photographs and her story resulted in a phenomenally successful fundraiser to expand her work, through which the team ended up raising over 2 million dollars within two weeks. Haya is also the Co Founder of the Documentary Association of Pakistan (DAP), an initiative to promote the art of documentary films in Pakistan. DAP also works closely with documentary filmmakers to provide them with networking and training opportunities by organizing filmmaker meet-ups and training workshops. She is a Fulbright alumna and an Acumen fellow.

Dr Laurent Gayer holds a PhD in political science (Sciences Po, 2004) and an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2020). He is interested in the violent fabric of society based on fieldwork conducted in South Asia (India, Nepal, Pakistan). The empirical heart of his work is the unruly megacity of Karachi, Pakistan. His most recent work focuses on the relationship between capital and coercion in South Asia, as well as on the global landscapes of vigilantism and rough justice more generally. He is the author of Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (Hurst, 2014) and, with Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, of Fiers de punir. Le monde des justiciers hors-la-loi (Proud to Punish: The Global Landscape of Rough Justice, Seuil, 2021). He is currently finishing a new book, Le capitalisme à main armée. Défendre l’ordre patronal dans un atelier du monde (Strong-arm Capitalism: Enforcing Corporate Order in Karachi, forthcoming with CNRS Éditions). In addition to his research activities, he teaches in the Master’s program in political science at Sciences Po, supervises doctoral students, and participates in the editorial boards of the journals Politix, Critique internationale, and Contemporary South Asia. At CERI, he is one of the coordinators of the research seminar “Travail de l’ordre, police et organisations répressives” (The Work of Law Enforcement, Police, and Repressive Organisations, TOPOR), which focuses on the contemporary transformations of policing and the lived experiences of security.

Fulgence Genouvrier-Lhermite is a Master 2 student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He holds a bachelor’s degree in musicology and is currently associated with the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) under the supervision of Esteban Buch. His research centers on exploring the connections between meditation and music in the Bön tradition, with a particular focus on the atmosphere. To investigate this topic, he collaborates with several bonpo practitioners in France at the Shenten Dargye Ling Association. During his fieldwork, he has extensively recorded the chöd and sangchöd practices with the goal of understanding how musical elements impact the meditation practices of the practitioners. Through an anthropological approach, he aims to establish links between sociological and theological aspects and the fundamental reality within these rituals.

Dr Zoé Headley is a social anthropologist, member of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS) and associate member of the French Institute of Pondicherry, India (CNRS-MAEE). An important part of her work is devoted to the transformations of social morphology in the villages of southwestern India (Tamil Nadu), to the issues and negotiations of caste membership and to the contemporary articulations of customary law. In this context, she has coordinated the constitution of a ‘village’ digital archive, DATAH (Digital Archive of Tamil Agrarian History-1650-1950). More recently, she initiated the STARS (Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society) project, which aims to document the history of studio photography in South India. The stars.archive currently includes over 42,000 digitized images (glass-plates, soft negatives and prints) has resulted in a number of exhibitions in India, France, Germany and England curated by artists and social scientists.

Amna Ilyas is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator. She holds an MA in Fine Art from the UCA (OCA), London. She has exhibited solo projects both at national and international venues, including Byat Al Mamzar, Dubai, Aicon Gallery in London, and Seven Art (now known as Nature Morte) in New Delhi, India. She has been awarded several fellowships for residencies and research programs globally, notable institutions such as the Vermont Studios Center in the USA, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in Scotland, Northlands Creative Glass Sculpture in the UK, Kempinski Art Program in Slovakia, Austria, Berlin and The Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest. Her research-led practice involved investigating the Anthrophony of the past. How might we listen to a past that existed before the development of sound reproduction technology? She is investigating whether sound, much like material objects, can be unearthed from these historical sites. Currently, she is engaged in a project titled “Museum of Sound” with the Vasl Artist Collective, exploring the possibility of excavating sound through the ancient ruins of Harappa. Amna currently resides and works between Dubai and Pakistan.

Wahid Mendil is an independent web designer based in France. He was a communications officer at the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS) in Paris. He has worked as a graphic and web designer for several Paris-based research centers, universities, and other public institutions. He has been responsible for designing most of the communication materials for the Winter School in Karachi since its inception in 2022, including the logo, booklet, and web templates.

Prof Chris Pinney is emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His chief interests are in commercial print culture and photography in South Asia and popular Hinduism in central India. Pinney’s research has a strong geographic focus in central India: initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-resident factory workers. Subsequently he researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular media (see eg. Camera Indica and Photos of the Gods). The Coming of Photography in India, based on the Panizzi Lectures was published by the British Library in October 2008. Other recent work includes Photography and Anthropology (Reaktion 2011) and (together with Suresh Punjabi) Artisan Camera: Studio Photography from Central India (Tara, 2013). He led the ERC-funded project “Citizens of the Camera: Photography and the Political Imagination” (2016-2020). He is currently leading the European Research Council funded project “Photodemos/Citizens of Photography”.

Dr Nicolas Puig is a researcher in anthropology at the IRD (Université Paris Cité). He conducts fieldwork in Tunisia (fieldwork not updated), Egypt, and Lebanon. His work focuses on urban environments, the connections between music, sound practices, perceptions, urban cultures, and politics. In recent years, he has been studying the anthropologies of sound, delving into the integration of migrants and refugees in Lebanese cities, and conducting human ecology studies such as analysing viral circulation in Lebanon and exploring the local ecological knowledge of spearfishermen in Senegal.

Quratulain Qamar is a multidisciplinary visual artist, photographer, and educator. She completed her M.Phil. in Art and Design with a distinction from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 2023. In 2010, she was honoured as a Fulbright Global UGrad Fellow at the University of Idaho, USA, where she studied painting, ceramics, and other studio arts. She has been teaching design, drawing, drafting, 3D/sculpture and mentoring younger artists since 2015. During the summer of 2024, she taught at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Currently, she is teaching at IVS and the Social Sciences and Liberal Arts department at IBA as adjunct faculty. Qamar has participated in various photography and teaching workshops, including ArtDubai’13 and the Karachi Biennale’22. Since 2014, her work has been exhibited in several galleries across Pakistan, including O’Art Space, Koel Gallery, Sambara, Full Circle, Amin Gulgee Gallery, VM Art Gallery, IVS Gallery, Frere Hall, FOMMA, and Standard Chartered Bank. Qamar’s artistic vision extends into wearable art pieces titled ‘Kairos’, designed using old clock parts and mechanisms —a practice inspired by clock installations that have featured prominently in her visual work. The concept of time intricately weaves through her art practice. Her personal journey unveiled the complexities of gendered time, broadening her perspective on the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that influence women’s time. Her research delves into women’s leisure, accountability for lost and wasted time, and the concept of unproductivity, particularly in the context of South Asian women.

Danial Shah is currently a Phd candidate at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He is an independent documentary photographer and filmmaker from Pakistan currently based between Brussels and Islamabad. Danial Shah is interested in issues related to human condition and the environment they interact with, particularly related to the marginalised. He works on commission and on editorial assignments. He holds a joint-masters degree in Documentary Film Direction from DocNomads in Portugal, Hungary and Belgium and a diploma in Documentary Film from University of California, Los Angeles.  Danial has taught basic and advance courses of photography and storytelling as a visiting faculty at different universities in Pakistan including department of Visual Studies and Media Studies at University of Karachi, department of Media Studies at Institute of Business Management, Karachi (IoBM) and department of visual studies at FC College, Lahore. He has conducted photography workshops at University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Dr Michel Tabet is a scholar in visual anthropology at LAS in Paris. He is interested in the relationship between creative documentary, cinema and social sciences. His approach is above all practical: through the production of films and audio-visual investigations, Michel Tabet tests and develops, within the framework of individual, collective or participatory projects, documentary projects which aim at exploring different life experiences.  From an epistemological perspective, he work on the modes of knowledge induced by films and the way it allows us to apprehend reality in its situated, contingent and temporal dimensions. For this, he pays particular attention to the articulation between knowledge, aesthetic and ethics. This leads him to develop anthropological documentary on two levels: that of production (observation, filming, imaging, narration, editing), and that of questioning the subject matter in itself: (what is a documentary image? How does it contribute to anthropological knowledge? What does it allow us to capture and feel?). Most of his research takes place in the Arab world where he has worked on issues related to religious rituals (Lebanon, Algeria), democratic transition (Tunisia) and peripheral and marginalized areas (Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia). He is also involved in initiatives that aim at disseminating visual anthropology through festivals (Jean Rouch, Haizebegi, Aswat) or collaborative and participatory workshops. The research program that he is currently developing focuses on the question of disaster in visual anthropology through a film on the explosion in the port of Beirut, on August 4, 2020.

Maroof Taj is a master’s student of anthropology at CESAH-LAS, EHESS, and an artist based in Paris. In his academic works, he is interested in employing the phenomenological concepts of self and others and the consequent relations between them in anthropology to dig deeper into the systems and structures of social life. His current subject of research is religious violence in Kasur, Pakistan. On the artistic side, he employs visual and performance-based mediums to elaborate his stories and concepts in the form of art documentation, images, murals, and sounds.

Saima Zaidi, a Communication Designer, based in Karachi is the Founder and Director of Numaish-Karachi, an award-winning interdisciplinary collective, which opens public spaces of the city for cultural production. The collective is currently engaged in a project titledThe Reading Room to revitalise the The Khalikdina Hall and Library in Karachi supported by the Cultural Protection Fund, UK.  Presently, she serves as Additional Curator at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, and has recently curated the exhibition titled Jhuley Lal: Crafting the Contemporary. She is the editor and designer of the book Mazaar, Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan published by Oxford University Press (OUP), Pakistan in collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund Library, Amsterdam (2010). She is currently editing a sister volume Hazaar Bazaar to be published by OUP in collaboration with the Endowment Fund Trust (forthcoming 2024). Zaidi has been teaching design at several institutions including the Department of Visual Studies, University of Karachi, Pakistan. She received her BFA in Design from the National College of Arts, Lahore and her MSc from the Pratt Institute, New York.

Shuting Zhao is a PhD candidate in anthropology at EHESS in Paris, working as a cultural consultant and an art news contributor for creative agencies in France. Her doctoral thesis focus on vernacular photography in China from the post-Maoist period to the pre-digital era (1980-2010). This research is both a reflection on photography as an object of anthropological research, and an oral history investigation that aims to gain a better understanding of the traces of the communist state under transformation in everyday life. She holds a joint-master’s degree in media, communication and creative industries from SciencesPo in Paris and Fudan University in Shanghai. In her Master’s thesis, she examined the emergence of modernity in Chinese private life through photographs of urban families. Her interests also touch on ethnographic documentaries. In 2023, she co-produced a documentary titled Extraordinary Yesterdays Reframed Intimate Histories about Chinese daily life through vernacular photography archives with Heidelberg University.