Skip to main content
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • ’Cuse Conversations Podcast
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
Campus & Community
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • University Statements
  • Syracuse University Impact
  • |
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
Sections
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • University Statements
  • Syracuse University Impact
  • |
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • ’Cuse Conversations Podcast
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
Campus & Community

Doctoral Candidate Wins Grant for Research on Infrastructure, Violence and Resistance in Pakistan

Friday, August 1, 2025, By News Staff
Share
Graduate SchoolMaxwell School of Citizenship and Public AffairsStudents
A young person wearing a colorful orange and navy blue headscarf smiles at the camera, with palm fronds and decorative elements visible in the background.

Bramsh Khan

Bramsh Khan, a Ph.D. candidate in social science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has been awarded a prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, established in 1941, is dedicated to advancing anthropological knowledge throughout the world; its highly competitive Dissertation Fieldwork Grant supports research that is innovative, field-based and globally relevant. With this award, Khan joins a distinguished lineage of anthropologists whose work is rooted in advocacy and community engagement.

Khan’s research examines how state-led infrastructural development in Balochistan, Pakistan, impacts the lives and livelihoods of Baloch people, who are both historically marginalized and actively persecuted. Khan, herself Baloch and from the region she studies, grounds her project in ethnographic fieldwork focusing specifically on the stories of Baloch women. It is a perspective that centers voices from, as she describes it, “the periphery of the periphery.”

Through these narratives, Khan reveals the layered consequences of the development of megaprojects—particularly a $62 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor and its M-8 motorway project, funded by China and Pakistan, that now cuts through land both sacred to the Baloch people and essential to their seasonal migration patterns. Shepherds, farmers and fishermen—whose livelihoods are closely tied to the land and sea—have been displaced and their way of life profoundly disrupted. Khan’s work exposes how the rhetoric of development and modernity can obscure violence and destruction. “These communities that are negatively impacted are not ‘undeveloped,’” Khan says. “They have been living sustainably with their environment for many generations.”

Khan’s research interrogates the rhetoric of development and modernity, asking: Who defines “development”? Who is served by it, and who pays the price? Her work highlights how infrastructure designed to “connect” can in fact isolate and disrupt. Roads, checkpoints and security zones have introduced both environmental degradation and increased militarization—bringing with them direct forms of violence, including disappearances and gender-based harm, as well as the more indirect forms inherent in cultural and economic precarity.

A young person wearing an ornate pink headscarf with gold embroidery speaks into a microphone while gesturing with her hand.

Bramsh Khan

Yet even as she documents this violence, Khan also emphasizes the community’s resilience—particularly apparent in how women are adapting and resisting. One example she shares is a grassroots initiative in which women from farming communities teach embroidery and craftwork to displaced shepherd women, helping them reclaim autonomy and sustain their families. “Nation-state building seeks to prioritize a national identity over ethnic, or ethno-national, identities, which means cultural erasure,” Khan says. “So, teaching one another, sharing cultural knowledge—this is resistance.”

Khan, already the recipient of a 2021 Fulbright Scholarship, intends to use the Wenner-Gren grant to deepen and expand her dissertation through multimodal storytelling. In collaboration with emerging Baloch filmmakers, she is developing a film project to document both the direct and indirect violence faced by Baloch women, as well as their strategies of endurance and resistance. “Writing is powerful, but involving the other senses—visual, auditory—will allow us to convey these women’s experiences and what they are living through in a much more visceral way,” Khan says.

Khan first became aware of the Wenner-Gren grant after she sought out Dan Olson-Bang, director of professional and career development in the Graduate School, for help in finding and applying for a fellowship to support her dissertation fieldwork. “The Wenner-Gren is a great fit for Bramsh, and she has done a great job of refining her work and creating a project that is powerful and relevant,” Olson-Bang says. “I tremendously enjoyed working with her to craft her proposal. These types of opportunities for external funding are integral to the success of graduate students like her.”

Story by Sarah H. Griffin

  • Author

News Staff

  • Recent
  • Heartfelt Gift Recognizes Accomplished Alumna and 3 Generations of Orange
    Thursday, August 21, 2025, By Jessica Youngman
  • Chaz Barracks Fuses Art, Scholarship and Community in Summer Residency
    Thursday, August 21, 2025, By News Staff
  • The New York State Fair: Everything You Need to Know
    Wednesday, August 20, 2025, By News Staff
  • Department of Public Safety Celebrates Graduation of 9th Peace Officer Academy
    Tuesday, August 19, 2025, By Kiana Racha
  • How Otto the Orange Spent Their Summer Vacation (Video)
    Tuesday, August 19, 2025, By News Staff

More In Campus & Community

Heartfelt Gift Recognizes Accomplished Alumna and 3 Generations of Orange

William Pelton and Mary Jane Massie have created the Barringer Pelton Public Service Graduate Scholarship to honor their niece, Jody Barringer ’95, L’98, G’08 (M.P.A.), and support future public servants. After working for a few years as an attorney focused…

Families Offer Words of Wisdom During Welcome Week Move In (Video)

Nearly 4,300 new undergraduate students arrived on campus this week, many of them with families and cars filled to the brim. As families help their children settle into their home away from home, they’re also sharing advice for the year…

Chaz Barracks Fuses Art, Scholarship and Community in Summer Residency

With a GoPro strapped to his helmet and a microphone clipped to his bike, Chaz Antoine Barracks spent the summer pedaling through Homer, New York, transforming everyday encounters into both scholarship and art. The filmmaker, media scholar and postdoctoral fellow…

The New York State Fair: Everything You Need to Know

Late August in Central New York not only means the return of students to the Syracuse University campus, but also the return of the New York State Fair. The fair is a 13-day festival of entertainment, agricultural exhibitions, cultural performances…

Department of Public Safety Celebrates Graduation of 9th Peace Officer Academy

On Aug. 14, the Department of Public Safety (DPS) welcomed families, friends and colleagues of the 9th Peace Officer Academy recruits to a graduation event. The ceremony, held at Drumlins Country Club, was the perfect culmination of their accomplishments over…

Subscribe to SU Today

If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.

Connect With Us

  • X
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
Social Media Directory

For the Media

Find an Expert Follow @SyracuseUNews
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • @SyracuseU
  • @SyracuseUNews
  • Social Media Directory
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Campus Status
  • Syracuse.edu
© 2025 Syracuse University News. All Rights Reserved.