Associate Professor, Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work
Ph.D., The Graduate Center CUNY, 2017
M.Phil., Jawaharlal Nehru University
(India), 2008
M.A., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2006
B.A., Aligarh Muslim University, 2003
ANTH 130: Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology
ANTH 210: Visual Anthropology
ANTH 304: Environmental Anthropology
ANTH 306: Cross Cultural Documentaries
ANTH 395: Ethnographies of South Asia
ANTH 395: Anthropology of Violence
ANTH 475H Honors: Religion and Ritual
I am an anthropologist with a strong belief in teaching as crucial to creating a just, sustainable, and pluralistic world. I seek to inspire students to build a critical understanding of socio-political questions in local and global contexts and to appreciate the interconnectedness of human and non-human worlds. I provide students with intellectual tools to nurture open-mindedness and to develop new modes of thinking. In my classes, I use a combination of social theory, ethnographic texts, and documentary films to illuminate anthropological approaches to cultural difference and questions of inequality and power, as well as to the discipline’s creative and imaginative potential.
I am interested in the production of knowledge about “South Asia,” the centering of India in that knowledge, and the consequences for those who live in its political, social and geographical margins. Informed in important ways by my lived experiences in the US, India and Kashmir, I engage questions like colonial continuities in postcolonial state formation, aporias of democracy and self-determination, history and memory, space and place, and visual logics of geopolitics. My previous work, supported by grants from Wenner Gren Foundation and Social Science Research Council, examined the history of youth activism, political subjectivity, and practices of state violence in Kashmir. My current project is an ethnographic study of the visual economy of violence in South Asia. I analyze ways in which the professional demands, material logistics, and ethics of photojournalism, as well as notions of ‘photorealism,’ relate to the visual framing of violence, how such framing mediates local and global understanding of political conflicts, and how images of violence are mobilized politically by governments, human rights groups, and activists in pursuit of inclusionary and exclusionary ends.
“The price of blood: state, precarity, and the moral discourse of loyalty in Kashmir.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East. (2020) 40 (1): 166–179.
“Counter-maps of the Ordinary: Occupation, subjectivity, and Walking under Curfew in Kashmir.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2019.1633115
“Disobedient Bodies, Defiant Objects: Occupation, Necropolitics, and the Resistance in Kashmir.” The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Issue 21, January-February.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2018. “Epitaphs as Counterhistories: martyrdom, commemoration and the work of graveyards in Kashmir.” In Resistance Occupation in Kashmir (The Ethnography of Political Violence), eds. Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, 248-277. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Junaid. Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life Under Military Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in Kashmir.” In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, ed. Kamala Visweswaran, 158-190. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2010. “Elephant in the Room: Debate over Right of Secession.” Economic and Political Weekly XLV, no. 50.
“The Undesirable State Subjects: Resettlement Act and the Citizenship Question in Kashmir.” Panel on Afterlives of Decolonization. 12th Annual Global South Asia NYU Conference, New York, Feb 28-29, 2020.
“‘Finish us all at once!’: violence and the work of time under military occupation in Kashmir.” Slow: a symposium in praxis and theory. Mass MOCA and MCLA, Nov 1, 2019.
“State-Making as War-making: Delusional States in South Asia.” Roundtable panel at Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, MD, Oct 17-20, 2019.
“Internal insecurity: Ikhwan, elections, and the state of emergency in Kashmir.” Panel on Security Empire. American Anthropology Association, Annual Meetings, Washington DC, Nov 29 - Dec 3, 2017.
“State of Emergency, State of Elections: The Social Meanings of ‘Democracy’ in Kashmir.” Panel on Ethnography of Political Process: the aporias of democracy and elections in India. Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, MD, Oct 26-28, 2017.
“Lines of control: military spatialization, violence, and Tehreek resistance in Kashmir.” American Anthropology Association, Annual Meetings, Denver, CO, Nov 18-22, 2015.
“Research in ‘Conflict Zones’, Methodological Pluralism, and Rethinking Philosophical Concepts in Ethnographic Research.” Seminar on Occupational Hazards: Theories and Methodologies. Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK, May 9-10, 2015.
