Maryam Aslany
Maryam Aslany is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in economic sociology and political economy. She is the author of Contested Capital (Cambridge University Press: 2020) which explores the rise of the rural middle classes. She is currently writing Peasants (Bloomsbury, Knopf: 2026), a book about the crisis of the global countryside, which draws on field research among smallholder farmers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Maryam is joining Yale University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow. Focussing on agrarian societies, her project will explore how forms of social stratification (class, ethnicity, caste, race, religion, and gender) impact experiences of climate change and differential adaptation strategies.
Maryam received her doctorate in Economic Sociology from King’s College London in 2018. Her doctoral research examined the class structure of the Indian countryside, and identified a large but previously neglected group – the rural middle class – whose material conditions and social aspirations were markedly different from its better-known urban counterpart.
Following her doctorate in 2018, 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.
Her current book, Peasants, offers a portrait of the world through five commodities: rice, sugarcane, coco, coca and oil palm. Based on extensive fieldwork, the aim is to provide an empirically based and comprehensive portrait of the extraordinary crisis confronting the global peasantry in the neoliberal era. In parallel, she is writing and presenting a podcast, Harvest, which tells a series of real-life stories built around events in agricultural societies.
Maryam’s research interests include comparative agrarian societies, peasant politics, agrarian 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.
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