Title: Securing water, insecuritizing the state: Governing water in Pakistan 

Maira Hayat, Assistant Professor of Environment and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

Maira Hayat is assistant professor of environment and peace studies in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a concurrent faculty member in the Department of Anthropology. She conducts research at the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and the environment, drawing on ethnographic and archival methods.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Hayat was a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology and at the Woods Institute for the Environment. She earned her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in December 2018. Hayat graduated from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan in 2008 and holds an MSc in social anthropology from the University of Oxford.

Hayat’s current and first book project is based on her doctoral dissertation, “Ecologies of Water Governance in Pakistan: The Colony, the Corporation and the Contemporary,” which won the 2019 S. S. Pirzada Annual Dissertation Prize for best dissertation on Pakistan. A dissertation chapter, “The Gender of Corruption: Bureaucrats, Bodies, and the Female Complaint in an Irrigation Bureaucracy,” won the Association for Feminist Anthropology’s 2018 Sylvia Forman Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper

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