School of Social and Political Science

Background

I trained as a social anthropologist at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, I taught anthropology at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan, and at SOAS,  the University of Sussex, and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.  

I have many years of experience as an anthropologist of Pakistan, working on academic and applied projects relating to public health and development. My most extensive work to date has been in the field of sexual and reproductive health and particularly HIV/AIDS. In 2004-05 I was the lead field researcher for Men on the Move study to discern sexual practices of rural-urban migrant men in Pakistan, which was carried out with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). In 2007-08, I was the anthropologist in a team of LSHTM and QAU researchers studying 'high-risk groups' for HIV/AIDS, namely hijra, commercial sex workers and people how use drugs. I carried out research on the reception of mass media messages to reproductive health, TB prevention and safe drinking water. 

For my PhD, I worked in a government health bureaucracy in Islamabad, participating in their everyday bureaucratic culture and policy work. I carried out ethnographic fieldwork with with government officials, donor agencies, and NGOs, and community AIDS activists, including HIV positive people.  My research interests include sexual and reproductive health, NGOs, bureaucracy, healthcare systems, migration and labour relations, and climate change and displacement. 

Current research

I am currently leading as PI on a Wellcome Trust funded project on ‘Doctors on the Streets: Health, Citizenship and Political Mobilisation of Medical Professionals in Pakistan’.  

Doctor-activists in Pakistan have shutdown hospitals, boycotted outpatient departments, organised sit-ins outside government buildings, and come out on the streets to demand better work conditions and better access to health in the public sector. This political mobilisation was triggered by recent legal amendments over public sector hospital autonomy which the (junior) doctors in the public sector hospitals saw as a form of stealth privatisation, likely to make public hospitals less accessible to the poor. This project explores this form of political mobilisation for health as public good and how might it relate to questions of (biomedical) citizenship, professional identities and the politics of protest/resistance.

I am working as Co-I with my colleague Jeevan Sharma and our research partners in Pakistan and Nepal on a project called 'Generating Evidence to Improve the Health and Well-being of South Asian Migrant Workers' funded by Novo Nordisk Fonden under their 'Transdisciplinary Approaches to Mobility and Global Health' joint call.

Remittances sent by overseas low-income migrants has become the lifelines of South Asian economy. South Asian men and women have sought to escape from difficult economic situations at home as migrant workers in the far-flung economies often in appalling living and working conditions, with profound risk to their physical and mental health. Reports of high incidence of death, injury and illness among South Asian migrant workers in various migrant destinations remain a major public concern. The alarming number of deaths of these migrants, including from ‘natural causes’, ‘cardiac arrest’ and ‘other causes’, calls for a research and policy engagement to understand and address the medical and non-medical risk factors, such as the costs associated with financing migration, working and living conditions, and other conditions that impact the physical and mental health outcomes for South Asian migrant workers health and well-being. 

Teaching

Anthropology of Health and Migration: I developed this course in 2019 and have been offering to Social Anthropology honours and MSc taught students. The course is popular within and outside SPS. In this course we examine the social, political and economic production of diseases and their interaction with the processes of migration, transit, legal status, and migrants - incorporation into the places to which they migrate, over time - as well as their effects on the places of origin and destination. The course offers anthropological perspectives on some of the great crises of health and migration in our times.

Anthropology of Health and Illness/Healing: I offered this with my colleague Alex Edmonds to Social Anthropology honours and MSc taught students in Medical Anthropology programme. The course is popular outside the subject area as well such as BMedSci and Nursing Studies students. In this course the students are introduced to key theories and current debates at the interface of anthropology and medicine through a focus on cross-cultural approaches to illness, pain, healing, the body and care. It explores how different ways of experiencing and knowing the body, including varied concepts of gender, sexuality, and the life course, can radically alter how people think about and engage with issues of health and healing.

I contribute teaching on following undergrad and postgraduate courses within SPS:

Anthropology of Global Health; Gender and Development; International Aid, Humanitarianism and Development; South Asia in the World; Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World, and Anthropological Theory. 

Publications

Books

A. Qureshi (2018) AIDS in Pakistan: Bureaucracy, Public Goods and NGOs. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

A. Qureshi and A. Khan (2016) Bonded Labour in Pakistan, Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Selected journal articles

A. Qureshi (2023) HIV Prevention and Public Morality in Pakistan: The Secular Normativity of Development, Anthropology & Medicine

A. Qureshi (2022) The Politics of Pakistan’s COVID-19 Response: A State-In-Society Approach, Pacific Affairs 95(4):731-756

A. Qureshi (2022) Valuing Care: Community Workers and Bureaucratic Violence in Global Health, Anthropology in Action 29(2):35-43 

A. Qureshi (2022) Stigma and Strategy in Pakistan's HIV Prevention Sector, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 28(4):1177-1191

A. Qureshi & Swenden, W. (2022). Introduction to the BASAS 2021 special section. Contemporary South Asia, 30(3), 384-387.

Noor, M. N., Holt, M., Qureshi, A., de Wit, J. & Bryant, J. (2020), Sexual risk-taking among homeless young people in Pakistan. Health and Social Care in the Community 2020;00:1–9

Qureshi, K, A Qureshi, Z Khawja (2016) Where There is No Weighing Scale: Newborn Nourishment and Care in Pakistani Punjab. Women’s Studies International Forum, 60, 128-135

A. Qureshi (2015). AIDS Activism in Pakistan: Diminishing Funds, Evasive State. Development and Change, 46(2), 320-338

A. Qureshi (2015) The Marketization of HIV/AIDS Governance: Public-Private partnership and Bureaucratic Cultures in Pakistan. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 33 (1): 35-48

A. Qureshi (2014) ‘Uncivil society': the politics of HIV activism in Pakistan, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(4): 694-710

A. Qureshi (2014) Up-scaling expectations among Pakistan’s AIDS bureaucrats: enterprising selves and precarious jobs in a hybrid bureaucracy, Global Public Health, 9(1-2): 72-84.

A. Qureshi (2013) Structural violence and the nation state: HIV and labour migration from Pakistan to the Persian Gulf, Anthropology and Medicine, 20(3): 209-220.

Collumbien, M, A. Qureshi, J. Chow (2009) Multiple risks among male and transgender sex workers in Pakistan. Journal of LGBT Health Research 4(2):71-79

Collumbien, M, S. Mayhew, A. Qureshi (2009) Understanding the context of male and transgender sex work by using PEER qualitative methods, Sexually Transmitted Infections 85(Suppl II):ii3-ii7.

Mayhew, S, M. Collumbien, A. Qureshi (2009) Protecting the unprotected: drug-use, sex work and rights in Pakistan’s fight against HIV/AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Infections 85(Suppl II):ii31-ii36