Palwasha Amanullah (she/her)
School of Architecture and Landscape
PhD Student
+44 114 222 6900
Full contact details
School of Architecture and Landscape
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
- Profile
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My current PhD research in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture is informed by situated experiences in Quetta’s multi-ethno-sectarian landscapes, shaped by religious politics, regional inequalities, and an ongoing urban polycrisis: the Baloch separatist insurgency, the ethno-sectarian conflict involving the Hazaras, and symbolic violence against largely invisible Dalit Hindus. Applying ethnographic methods, the research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine the spatial and political arrangements of urban borders. Within the context of everyday urbanism characterised by insecurity and powerlessness, my work focuses on reconfiguring forms and provisional infrastructures that enable alternative ways of living. In doing so, it explores how practices and processes of urban rearrangements challenge the dominant logic of borders in contemporary urban politics.
In addition to my research, I have taught across a range of modules in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, including supervising MA Urban Design thesis projects. I have also undertaken responsibilities as a Graduate Teaching Assistant within the School of Geography.
- Qualifications
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I graduated with a degree in architecture from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and completed my MA in Research Architecture at the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In addition, I have a Master of Science in Environmental Management and Policy from BUITEMS, Quetta, Pakistan.
- Research interests
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Thesis Project Title:
It’s Only Desire, After All
Framing Everyday Border Re-arrangements, Infrastructures, and Extensions
Project Outline:
Scholarly analyses of urban conflicts often frame borders through binaries—occupation/territorial fragmentation, checkpoints/identity politics, blockades/infrastructural disparity—treating them as instruments of top-down control. My thesis provides descriptive accounts of border enactments across the three ecological spheres within contexts of politicised identities and related forms of violence. In Quetta, a frontier geography and one of the most violent cities in the world, urbanism is shaped by a polycrisis: Baloch separatist insurgency, ethno-sectarian conflict involving Hazara, and symbolic violence against largely invisible Dalit Hindus. The crisis has produced borders that physically and symbolically marginalise communities. Followed by ethnographic observations and interviews from Quetta, I conceptualise borders as processual arrangements that the commons navigate to re-arrange life—as people substitute infrastructures and thus extensions across multiple locations and affiliations—are practised in ways that challenge the dominant logic of borders in urban politics.
It is proposed that, contrary to the depiction of a failed or low state of security in the city, everyday politics are reconstituted, with state and non-state actors reworking informality not as a residual condition but as a practice central to the production of everyday urbanism. Will what is assembled today still be a desire tomorrow? Im-permanence is viewed as central to border urbanism, recognising assemblages across borders as critical for economic survival under conditions of intersecting vulnerability. Lefebvre's everyday politics (2015), Deleuze's desire (1983), and Maliq's (2022) reading of the city form an understanding of what it means for marginalised groups in a peripheral city of Pakistan to exist ‘beyond humanism’ (Mbembe, 2003), while remaining driven by desire to generate possibilities within constantly shifting horizons.