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King’s People

Biography

Dr Daanish Mustafa obtained his BA in Geography from Middlebury College, USA, his MA from University of Hawai'i Manoa, and his PhD in Geography from University of Colorado. 

He has taught at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA and then at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, before finding his intellectual home in the Department of Geography. While at King's, he has received the School of Social Science and Public Policy excellence in teaching award.

His research has been funded by the Belmont Forum, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Department for International Development (DfID), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), National Geographic Society, Royal Geographical Society, and the British Academy.

Daanish was the co-author of the first climate change response strategies for Pakistan, in addition to being the lead author for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Pakistan five-year flood response strategy. In addition, he has also undertaken policy-related work with the DfID, International Organization for Migration (IOM), Stimson Centre, and United States Institute for Peace (USIP).

Research

  • Critical water resources geographies
  • Environmental hazards and climate risk
  • Critical geographies of violence and terror
  • Problematising environment and development

Daanish's research interests have been in water resources geography, environmental hazards, development and critical geographies of violence and terror.

Conceptually he was closer to structuralism at the beginning of his career, but more recently he found himself more attracted to post-structuralism and insights by Hannah Arendt on performative politics. In that vein, his most recent projects have been concerned with gender performativity and violence in Pakistan, cultural politics of urban horticulture in Pakistan, and hydro-social territorialization in Jordan.

Teaching

Undergraduate

  • 6SSG3056 Political Economy of Hazardscapes

Postgraduate

  • 7SSG5153 Critical Geographies of Terrorism
  • 7SSG5106 Development and Environmentalism in the 'South'

PhD supervision

Daanish welcomes PhD studentship applications relating to:

  • Property rights, equity and community in irrigation management
  • Disaster risk reduction: from theory to practice 
  • The spatiality and geography of violence and terror
  • Subnational scale hydropolitics
  • Post-structuralist reinterpretation of environmental hazards
  • Hazardscapes of modernity, development and underdevelopment
  • Critical reappraisal of participatory development.
  • Social power in water resources management and development
  • Space, emancipation and performative politics

Further details

See Daanish's research profile