Lalaie Ameeriar’s research examines how histories of systemic racism shape contemporary experiences of health, care, and belonging across diasporic and transnational communities. Her work brings together medical anthropology, labour studies, feminist theory, and the study of affect and embodiment to analyze how institutions manage difference through bodily regulation, sensory norms, and forms of intimate governance.

Her first book, Downwardly Global: Women, Work and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2017), draws on multi-sited fieldwork in Lahore, Karachi, London, and Toronto. The book investigates how immigrant women navigate precarious labour markets and how multicultural institutions reproduce inequality through everyday practices of evaluation and care. Downwardly Global received Honorable Mentions from both the Association for Asian American Studies and the National Women’s Studies Association.

Her current monograph, Carry Me Gently: Maternal Harm and the Afterlife of Care (under revision with Duke University Press), explores how birthing people endure medical neglect and institutional abandonment within contemporary health systems in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, the project combines ethnography, institutional analysis, and narrative writing to examine how care persists through grief, loss, and structural vulnerability. Publications from this research include articles forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, along with creative nonfiction pieces in American Ethnologist, Rogue Agent, Ricepaper Magazine and The Sun Literary Magazine.

Her newest project, What We Inherit: Racialized Care Work during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic, analyzes the experiences and memory work of nurses, personal support workers, and birth workers who sustained essential infrastructures of care while navigating heightened risk and limited institutional protection. Through oral history, digital storytelling, and community partnerships, this research examines how frontline care workers generate counterarchives and alternative visions of health, safety, and social worth.

Ameeriar has held fellowships at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Research Interests

• SSHRC Insight Grant - 2021-2026
• UCLA - Visiting Scholar, Asian American Studies Research Center - 2023-4
• Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton - 2016-17
• University of California Faculty Research Fellowship - 2016-17
• Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship) - 2014-15
• Hellman Faculty Fellowship - 2014
• Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Fellowship, UCSB - 2013
• Center for New Racial Studies, UCSB - 2013
• The University of Michigan, National Center for Institutional Diversity, Emerging Diversity Scholar - 2010-11
• The Social Science Research Center, Humboldt University Berlin, Irmgard Coninx Visiting Scholar - 2010

Current Courses

Upcoming Courses

Lalaie Ameeriar’s research examines how histories of systemic racism shape contemporary experiences of health, care, and belonging across diasporic and transnational communities. Her work brings together medical anthropology, labour studies, feminist theory, and the study of affect and embodiment to analyze how institutions manage difference through bodily regulation, sensory norms, and forms of intimate governance.

Her first book, Downwardly Global: Women, Work and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2017), draws on multi-sited fieldwork in Lahore, Karachi, London, and Toronto. The book investigates how immigrant women navigate precarious labour markets and how multicultural institutions reproduce inequality through everyday practices of evaluation and care. Downwardly Global received Honorable Mentions from both the Association for Asian American Studies and the National Women’s Studies Association.

Her current monograph, Carry Me Gently: Maternal Harm and the Afterlife of Care (under revision with Duke University Press), explores how birthing people endure medical neglect and institutional abandonment within contemporary health systems in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, the project combines ethnography, institutional analysis, and narrative writing to examine how care persists through grief, loss, and structural vulnerability. Publications from this research include articles forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, along with creative nonfiction pieces in American Ethnologist, Rogue Agent, Ricepaper Magazine and The Sun Literary Magazine.

Her newest project, What We Inherit: Racialized Care Work during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic, analyzes the experiences and memory work of nurses, personal support workers, and birth workers who sustained essential infrastructures of care while navigating heightened risk and limited institutional protection. Through oral history, digital storytelling, and community partnerships, this research examines how frontline care workers generate counterarchives and alternative visions of health, safety, and social worth.

Ameeriar has held fellowships at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Degrees

Research Interests

Awards

• SSHRC Insight Grant - 2021-2026
• UCLA - Visiting Scholar, Asian American Studies Research Center - 2023-4
• Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton - 2016-17
• University of California Faculty Research Fellowship - 2016-17
• Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship) - 2014-15
• Hellman Faculty Fellowship - 2014
• Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Fellowship, UCSB - 2013
• Center for New Racial Studies, UCSB - 2013
• The University of Michigan, National Center for Institutional Diversity, Emerging Diversity Scholar - 2010-11
• The Social Science Research Center, Humboldt University Berlin, Irmgard Coninx Visiting Scholar - 2010

Current Courses

Upcoming Courses