Maryam Aslany

Maryam Aslany has a background in economic sociology and political economy. At Yale, her research will explore how forms of social stratification (class, ethnicity, caste, race, religion, and gender) impact the experience of ecological crisis, and generate differential adaptation strategies, in Indian agrarian society. Maryam is the author of Contested Capital (Cambridge University Press: 2020), a book on the rise of India’s rural middle classes, as well as Peasants (Bloomsbury, Knopf: 2026), which will describe the crisis of the global countryside. Maryam holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from King’s College London (2018) and an MSc in Indian studies from 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 – whose material conditions and social aspirations were markedly different 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 was a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where she worked on a large-scale EU-funded research project concerning youth and future migration from West Africa. Her current book, Peasants, will offer a portrait of the world through four conspicuous commodities: rice, sugarcane, cocoa and coca. Based on extensive fieldwork, this ongoing project will provide an empirically based and comprehensive portrait of the crisis confronting the global peasantry in the neoliberal era.

Maryam has lived and conducted research among rural communities in India, Fiji, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Kenya, Ghana, Cape Verde, and The Gambia. Her research interests include: comparative agrarian political economy, peasant politics, agrarian transition, 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.