Zahra Khalid

Student Fellow

Zahra Khalid is a doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she studies cultural materialism and political economy, with particular interest in the interconnection between militarism and uneven development. Her dissertation project studies military-led speculative real-estate developments in Pakistan and associated “structures of feeling”—middle class desires, anxieties, and proclivities—to illuminate how housing becomes a site to materialize capital flows. It is based on 17 months of ethnographic and archival research. Zahra holds a Master’s in city planning, and a BSc. (honors) with a major in financial investments and accounting. She previously worked in the international development industry.

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail. What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?