Umair Javed is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS). He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
His research looks at the politics of urban development and the informal economy in Pakistan, as well as forms of non-state and informal welfare across a range of contemporary Muslim societies . His work has been published in Studies in Comparative International Development, Development and Change, Antipode, IDS Bulletin, Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and Economic and Political Weekly. He has also authored book chapters on Pakistan's political economy in edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press, Palgrave MacMillan, and Routledge. Outside of academia, he contributes a fortnightly political and social affairs column for Pakistan's leading English-language daily, Dawn.
His ongoing research projects include 1) a book manuscript, drawing on his doctoral research, on the politics of informality in Pakistani bazaars; 2) a study of social transformation and differentiated citizenship in urban village settlements engulfed by high-income residential developments in Lahore; and 3) a survey-based assessment of informal social protection and zakat in Pakistan, with colleagues based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, Sussex) and the International Centre for Taxation and Development (ICTD).