Friday, November 1, 2024
2:00pm - 4:00pm EST
Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St
Commentator:
Poulami Roychowdhury, Brown University
Sidra Kamran is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She conducted her PhD research at The New School for Social Research, where she also completed a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
She uses ethnographic and interview methods to study work, gender and sexuality, and social class.
Her current book project examines the flourishing yet stigmatized occupations of beauty and retail work in the context of Pakistan’s transition to a service economy and the persisting taboos on women’s participation in the public sphere. Her other research has explored working-class women's digital practices on TikTok in Pakistan.
You can read more about her research here and find her on Google Scholar.
She also discusses some of her research on the workplace as a type of public space on this podcast for Failed Architecture.
About the talk: Pakistan’s expanding service economy has created a new stratum of highly visible women workers in public spaces—beauty salon and retail workers—who are transforming the urban landscape of a country with one of the lowest female labor participation rates globally. Drawing on interviews and ethnography in Meena Bazaar (a women-only marketplace) and Delight (a mixed-gender budget department store), I argue that beauty salon and retail workers are caught in-between multiple class and moral meanings, which elude easy categorizations. By systematically analyzing the labor process and labor market for women, I show how gender and class dynamics converge to produce beauty and retail workers as individuals who are considered economically in-between (neither working class nor middle class) and morally in-between (both “good women” and “bad women”). By theorizing the mechanisms that undergird this "gendered class ambiguity" and exploring how women exploit these contradictory classifications for their own gain, I explain a new type of gendered class formation in South Asia.