Fields of Study
- Sociocultural Anthropology
Biography
Waqas H. Butt is an anthropologist at University of Toronto Scarborough whose work focuses on the political life of infrastructure in contemporary Pakistan. His first project explored these interests through a study of waste, caste, labour, and urbanization across Pakistan, with a focus on Lahore and urban Punjab. In particular, his book Life beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructures in Urban Pakistan, published by Stanford University Press in 2023, examines the ways in which waste workers, who are drawn predominantly from low or non-caste (Dalit) groups, have become essential components of urban life through the everyday and intimate workings of waste infrastructures. More recently, Professor Butt has started a new project examining the socio-ecological transformation wrought by infrastructural interventions across the Indus River Basin and what those transformations reveal about contemporary politics as much in Pakistan and South Asia and across the Global North and Global South. His work has brought together a variety of concerns—materiality of waste and value, histories of caste, labor, and urbanization, and contemporary political ecologies—to unpack the unexpected socio-political processes by which life, in its most expansive sense, is being radically transformed across South Asia and more broadly.
Selected Recent Publications
2023. Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan. Stanford University Press.
2023. "South Asian Urban Climates : Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (with Rehman, N., Parikh, A., Lamb, Z., Syal, S., Ghertner, D.A., Menon, S., Anwar, N., Nabi, H., Ranganathan, M., Srinivasan, K., Bhat, H., Powis, A., Anand, N.)
2020. “Accessing Value in Lahore’s Waste Infrastructures.” Ethnos, pp.1-21.
2020. “Technics of Labor: Productivism, Expertise, and Solid Waste Management in a Public‐Private Partnership.” Anthropology of Work Review, 41(2), pp.108-118.
2020. “Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia.” Anthropology of Work Review 41(2): 71-75. (written with Maira Hayat and Adam Sargent).
2020. “Waste intimacies: Caste and the unevenness of life in urban Pakistan.” American Ethnologist 47 (3): 234-248.