Umair Rasheed (PhD candidate, Sociology) and Alex Kaiser (PhD student, Sociology) have been awarded 2025 Nicholson Fellowship to attend School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.  In an intensive six-week course of study, participants work with a faculty of distinguished scholars in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium which are attended by the entire group. The program also includes mini-seminars and stand-alone lectures. The Unit’s fellowship covers the tuition and provides a housing stipend. 

Umair is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology. His dissertation examines how Islamic devotional ethics, right-wing populism, and capitalist social relations shape Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy activism. Against perspectives that see populism as instrumentalizing the masses, he proposes the notion of pious populism to study how right-wing politics becomes a way of living a pious life. Based on an ethnography with rank-and-file members of a new Islamist party, he describes how, amid a crisis of neoliberal austerity, disenfranchised men shun patron-client networks of the political elite and pursue honor and self-reliance by joining the new party. As a Nicholson fellow, he will attend The Terms of Violence seminar to help theorize how anti-blasphemy vigilantism relates to multiple other forms of violence in society. 

Alex is a Ph.D. student in sociology. His dissertation research attends to the intersection of life and non-normative labor in urban, Midwest settings, focusing on individuals involved in “hustling,” understood principally as a piecemeal combination of remunerative activities of varying formality, and how these individuals perform and embody certain (especially gendered) subjectivities in response to their everyday work experiences. His current project employs a queer and decolonial epistemological approach to see Hip Hop artists as knowledge producers and theorists on the raced, classed, gendered, and criminalized discursive figure of the hustler. As a Nicholson fellow, he will be attending the seminar Black Living, Black Art.