Student Spotlight: Maira Hayat

My dissertation, Ecologies of Water Governance in Pakistan: the colony, the corporation and the contemporary, is a historical-legal ethnography examining how the changing terrain of water use and land ownership in the Punjab (the country’s agricultural heartland) shores up and/or undermines state sovereignty, bureaucratic authority, ethical self-formation, and corporate power. The dissertation has three temporal anchors: i) the 1870s–1920s, when the legal and physical infrastructures of irrigation were laid in Punjab; ii) Pakistan’s ‘Decade of Development’ (1960s) under Ayub Khan’s military rule; iii) the contemporary water ‘crisis.’ Across these, I examine how temporalities of crisis, development and the bureaucratic intersect.