Sheharyar Imran

shimran@jhu.edu

RIC Graduate Fellow

Sheharyar’s research interests lie at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, postcolonial and feminist thought, and critical animal studies. His dissertation, “(Non)Life Under Global Capitalism: Disenchantment, Domination, and Necropolitics in a More-than-Human World” explores the politics of life under global capitalism. The dissertation seeks to understand capitalist modernity as predicated upon what he calls “more-than-human necropower.” That is, a form of power that operates through the denial of lively existence across human and nonhuman registers. He is interested in exploring how capitalism not only degrades life for various forms of life but is fundamentally premised upon the denial of life and liveliness for its existence. The dissertation thus asks how notions of “nonlife” undergird capitalist processes of conquest, extraction, and exploitation. It does so by focusing on human/non-human assemblages that constitute the texture of capitalist life in a more-than-human world, specifically looking at three critical sites of capitalist production and extraction: mono-crop plantations, the human body, and factory farms.