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Aalene Mahum Aneeq

Aalene Mahum Aneeq

PhD Candidate
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of Social Sciences

Email: a.aneeq@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Monika Barthwal-Datta, Andrea Benvenuti

Aalene is a PhD researcher working on the history of franchise and elections in Pakistan from 1947-1971. Broadly, her project studies the bureaucratic processes of decolonisation, democratisation, and citizen-making in South Asia. Previously, she obtained her masters in South Asian Studies as an Ertegun Graduate Scholar at the University of Oxford. Her work at Oxford focused on partition refugee resettlement in Punjab and its impact on citizenship in the new nation. Her second project focused on women leaders in early Pakistani politics. 

Aalene has taught undergraduate courses on Pakistani history and on gender, nation and politics in colonial South Asia at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and at the Information Technology University (ITU) in Pakistan from 2018 to 2021. She has also served as a tutor in Global Governance at UNSW. Aalene feels strongly about deepening decolonised studies of South Asia in Australian academic spaces and including them within broader conversations on global governance. 
  • South Asian Studies
  • Pakistani History
  • Democracy, Elections and Franchise
  • Decolonisation
  • Citizenship
  • “Rewriting Pakistani Democracy: The Story of Universal Adult Franchise in the 1950s and 60s” (Upcoming paper presentation at the biennial NZASIA Conference’23 in Christchurch, New Zealand November 2023).
  • Invited to be a panelist for the Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives book launch, (Monash Centre for Migration and Inclusion, Monash University, Australia October 2023).
  • “From Refugees to Voters: The 1951 Provincial Elections in Pakistan’s Punjab” (Paper presented at the Arts, Design and Architecture HDR Conference, University of New South Wales, Australia July 2023).
  • Aneeq, A. M. “To the Editor: Partition Refugee Relief and the Making of the ‘Pakistani Muslim Citizen’ in Punjab” in The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, eds., V. Nguyen and E. Gandhi (Routledge, Jan. 2023).
  • “Blogging, Activism, and the Online Public Sphere: The Case of Female Pakistani Influencers” (Paper presented at the Transnational resistance to ethnoreligious nationalisms in South Asia symposium, University of Newcastle, Australia July 2022).
  • “To the Editor: Partition Refugee Relief and the Making of the ‘Pakistani Muslim Citizen’ in Punjab” (Paper presentation at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Taiwan June 2022).
  • “Decolonisation and Democratisation: Fatima Jinnah in Postcolonial Pakistani Politics” (Invited to chair a session with Dr. Reza Pirbhai, Ideas Conclave, University of Central Punjab, Pakistan December 2020).
  • “The Aftermath of Independence: Gendering Pakistani History through the Lens of Fatima Jinnah” (Paper presented at the Graduate Workshop: New Directions in Pakistan Studies, Oxford, UK April 2018).
  • “Fracturing the ‘Mother of the Nation’ Image: Fatima Jinnah’s Evolution to Post-Independence Pakistani Politics” (Paper presented at the St. Antony’s Graduate Research Conference, Oxford, UK April 2018).