Maryam Aslany
Maryam Aslany is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Yale University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with a background in economic sociology and political economy. Her work focusses on the crisis of the global countryside.
She is the author of ‘Contested Capital’ (Cambridge University Press: 2020) which explores the rise of the rural middle classes. Maryam is currently writing twin volumes, ‘Peasants’ (Bloomsbury, Knopf: 2027), and ‘Goddess’ (Knopf: 2029), which together provide a portrait of planetary society, economy, and politics, focussing respectively on the two extremes of the global supply chain.
Maryam holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from King’s College London (2018) and an MSc in Indian Studies from the University of Oxford (2013). Her doctoral research examined the class structure of the Indian countryside, and identified a large but previously neglected group – the rural middle class – with markedly different material conditions and social aspirations from its better-known urban counterpart.
Following her doctorate, she conducted a collaborative study of the political economy of climate-change adaptation in Fiji, which was funded by the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. In 2019, she joined Wolfson College, University of Oxford, as a postdoctoral researcher and Junior Research Fellow, where she continued her research on climate-change adaptation, with a comparative perspective on India. From 2020 to 2022, Maryam worked at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) as a senior researcher, where she worked on a large-scale EU-funded research project concerning youth and future migration from West Africa.
Maryam has conducted research among agrarian communities in India, Fiji, Cambodia, Ghana, Cape Verde, and The Gambia. Her research interests include comparative agrarian political economy, peasant politics, agrarian transition and climate change adaptation, climate-induced migration, and theories of class. Her research is primarily based on mixed methods for handling large national data sets, quantitative field evidence, qualitative case material and social profiles.
Publications:
Books
Aslany M. (2020) Contested Capital: Rural Middle Classes in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Aslany M. (2027, forthcoming) Peasants: their 21st-century crisis and why the globe depends on them (London: Bloomsbury & New York: Knopf)
Aslany M. (2029, forthcoming) Goddess: Why Divinity is Capitalism’s Most Valuable Product (New York: Knopf)
Articles
Aslany M. (2019) ‘The Indian Middle Class Its Size and Urban-Rural Variation’, Contemporary South Asia, 27:2 196-213
Aslany M. Sommerfelt T and Carling J (2022) ‘Empirical analyses of determinants of migration aspirations’, QuantMig Project Deliverable D2.5. (Southampton).
Aslany M. and Brincat S. (2021) ‘Class and climate-change adaptation in rural India: Beyond community-based adaptation models’, Sustainable Development, Vol. 29 No. 3 pp. 571-582.
Aslany M. Carling J. Mjelva M. B. and Sommerfelt T. (2021) ‘Systematic Review of determinant of migration aspirations’, QuantMig Project Deliverable D2.2. (Southampton).
Book Reviews
Harriss‐White B. and Aslany M. (2019), review of ‘The political ecology of climate change adaptation: Livelihoods agrarian change and the conflicts of development by Marcus Taylor’. London: Routledge/Earthscan. 2015. Journal of Agrarian Change.