Lalaie Ameeriar

Lalaie Ameeriar received an Honors B.A. in Socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto, and a Masters degree and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. From 2008-2011, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University.

Professor Ameeriar's research interests include globalization, immigration, multiculturalism, and labor. Her research draws from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan, and Toronto, Canada. She is currently working on a book manuscript, "Downwardly Global: Pakistani Women, Unemployment, and the Ethics of Multiculturalism in Diasporic Toronto," which focuses on the transnational labor migration of Pakistani women and examines the ways that questions of unemployment are being rationalized and understood by governmental bodies and policy makers as questions of culture and embodied difference. Her research works to understand not simply how this happens and to what effect, but also the cultural registers through which the unemployed come to understand themselves as not simply professional and foreign but also Canadian and Ethnic, and as such her work examines the everyday intimate spaces in which processes of globalization are negotiated. In her research she seeks to contribute to the ongoing project of extending the parameters of Asian American studies to include the experiences of those in "the Americas" specifically by including the experiences of Asian Canadians.

Her next project, "The Gendered Suspect" is a post 9/11 examination of the experiences of South Asian women at the border deemed suspect. While much has been written on the racial profiling that happens to South Asian men at the border, for South Asian women there is a corresponding phenomenon that draws on popular images of Other women. South Asian women's border crossings demonstrate the intersections of gender, race, security, and nation in processes of globalization, and illustrate the specific ways these intersections are deeply implicated in the politics of citizenship and belonging. In this context, borders have moral economies and crossing the border becomes a gendered act.

Professor Ameeriar's teaching in the Department includes the following courses: South Asian Women in Diaspora, Ethnographies of Asian America, and Globalization and Asian America. Her courses examine social scientific methodology as a means of uncovering the lived experience of Asian Americans in global processes, or the dark side of what has been described as "the global village" through examining the politics of everyday life.

She has been a fellow at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. In 2010, Professor Ameeriar was named an Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity at The University of Michigan.