Mahvish Ahmad

Mahvish Ahmad is an educator, scholar, and organiser. She is an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics.

Mahvish studies state violence and the intellectual and political labour of movements targeted in repression. Movements produce analyses, critiques, and alternatives to violent states, for example in underground pamphlets. Through this work, she investigates non-canonical movement thought to expand what constitutes social theory. As part of this work, Mahvish is a co-founder of Revolutionary Papers and a UK-based Trustee of the South Asian Research and Resource Centre (SARRC), an Islamabad-based archive of Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements.

Earlier, Mahvish was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape; a PhD student at the University of Cambridge; a Visiting Faculty at Quaid-e-Azam University; and a Teaching Fellow at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She also spent several years working as a journalist in Pakistan, co-founding Tanqeed (with Madiha Tahir), a bilingual Urdu/English magazine of the Pakistani left in Islamabad,