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Ayesha Omer | Dust and the Digital Borderland

by Program in South Asian Studies

Lecture

Tue, Jan 27, 2026

4:30 PM – 6 PM EST (GMT-5)

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Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Details

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In this talk, Ayesha Omer follows an overland fiber optic cable from China’s Xinjiang region across the internationally disputed territories of Kashmir to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, as part of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative. She charts the formation of a digital borderland in the Himalayan mountains through the institution of digital communications and border customs infrastructure. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, and leaked policy documents, this talk demonstrates that instantaneous digital connection is produced on fraught grounds in relation to local imaginaries of futures filled with “dust”.

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Ayesha Omer's profile photo

Ayesha Omer

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, York University

Dr. Ayesha Omer is an Assistant Professor of digital futures at York University, Canada. In 2025-26, she is a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, USA. Dr. Omer studies the relationships between media technologies, political sovereignty, and the climate crisis. While at the IAS, she is completing her book manuscript, Networks of Dust: Media Technologies and Environments of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which examines dust as the materiality and mediation of infrastructural intervention in indigenous environments, through an ethnography of Chinese digital logistics, energy, and communications infrastructure in Pakistan's borderlands.

Hosted By

Program in South Asian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in South Asian Studies (OWNER)

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