Author Archives: Ramsha Usman

Ramsha Usman is a third year PhD student in the department of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests focus on disability, labor, occupational health and risk, care, and South Asia.
ramshausman@ucsb.edu | Assemblage Profile
The cover of the book Pollution is Colonialism which has a black background with a petri dish on it.

Reading Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism in a Chemistry Lab

Ramsha Usman December 20, 2022

Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) uses plastics to trace pollution in fish stomachs in Newfoundland while showing how this pollution is embedded in bad “land relations.” For Liboiron, land relations refers to how land is assumed to be available for settler goals and how it allows for some pollution to occur.  One of their main goal in thinking about environmental science as a practice is to see how science can align with or against colonialism. They point to the fact that even when researchers work toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Colonialism, according to Liboiron, who borrows their ideas on the subject from Tiffany Lethabo King, is not just bad action or even intention but a set of relations that allows for bad land relations to occur and make sense. Their aim is to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. (read more...)

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Movement of a worker through the landscape of care in and around the Special Economic Zone called Value Addition City in Pakistan.

Injury and Fitness: Responsibility through Biomedicine 

Ramsha Usman October 4, 2022
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Kashif pointed to different parts of the wounds on his leg and explained to me how they had healed, exacerbated, or been ignored at different places of care. He had gotten a chemical burn injury on his left leg a year ago while mixing HCl (Hydrochloric acid) and H2O2 (Hydrogen peroxide in bleach), two highly reactive chemicals, almost on the spot of the textile factory where he stood now and talked to me. He was not among the first few people introduced to me by the Safety and Security Officer because he was not considered disabled among the workers at the factory I was conducting fieldwork in Punjab, Pakistan. (read more...)

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