Alia completed her PhD at the LSE’s Department of Gender Studies in June 2024. Her PhD project provides an ethnographic account of the everyday lives and political subjectivities of Pakistan’s domestic workers, exploring how these marginal subjects narrate and navigate the stark material inequality between themselves and their employers in a social context marked by patronage relations and deeply entrenched hierarchies of class, caste, and gender. Her research interests lie in exploring the co-constitution of class, gender, and caste in everyday life, and in how these exploitative social relations shape the political subjectivities of marginal groups. 

Alia's research interests are led primarily by her work as a Pakistan-based Left political organiser who has worked with various communities and movements across Pakistan for more than two decades. She has an MPhil in Anthropology from Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Hampshire College, USA. She currently teaches at the Center of Excellence in Gender Studies at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.