Search results for ""Author Nichola Khan""

A monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. In this first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England, Nichola Khan examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. Khan’s analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Her nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork have given Khan a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ own stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of local family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lenses of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, even the journey to remit money overseas—and immobility, describing the migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. Arc of the Journeyman is a deeply humane portrayal that expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.

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A monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. In this first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England, Nichola Khan examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. Khan’s analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Her nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork have given Khan a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ own stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of local family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lenses of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, even the journey to remit money overseas—and immobility, describing the migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. Arc of the Journeyman is a deeply humane portrayal that expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.

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Karachi is a city framed in the popular imagination by violence, be it criminality and gangsterism or political factionalism. That perception also dominates literary, cinematic and scholarly representations and discussions of this great metropolis. By commenting in different ways on the trials and tribulations of Karachi and Pakistan, the contributors to this innovative book on the city build on past writings to say something new or different - to make their reader re-think how they understand the processes at work in this vast urban space. They scrutinise Karachi's diverse neighbourhoods to show how violence is manifested locally and citywide into protest drinking, social and religious movements, class and cosmopolitanism, gang wars, and how it affects the fractured lives of militants and journalists, among others. Oral history and memoir feature strongly in the volume as do insights gleaned from anthropology and political science The contributors include academics, ethnographers, journalists, writers and activists: Nadeem F. Paracha, Laurent Gayer, Zia Ur Rehman, Nida Kirmani, Nichola Khan, Oskar Verkaaik, Arif Hasan, Razeshta Sethna, Asif Farrukhi, Kausar S. Khan, Farzana Shaikh, and Kamran Asdar Ali.

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This brief book introduces the ways in which contemporary anthropology engages with the "psych" disciplines: psychology, psychiatry, and medicine. Khan also widens the conversation by including the perspectives of epidemiologists, addiction and legal experts, journalists, filmmakers, activists, patients, and sufferers. New approaches to mental illness are situated in the context of historical, political, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial frameworks, allowing readers to understand how health, illness, normality, and abnormality are constructed and produced. Using case studies from a variety of regions, Khan explores what anthropologically informed psychology, psychiatry, and medicine can tell us about mental illness across cultures.

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