Asim Rafiqui defends his PhD thesis

On June 15th 2026 Asim Rafiqui defended his PhD thesis entitled:

The Sentient Sea: Mahigeer Life Worlds Under the Lengthening Shadow of a Seaport

On the southwestern edge of Pakistan, near the Iranian border, lies a city that has captivated the imagination of Pakistan’s industrialists, property developers, business leaders, and politicians for the past 20 years. Gwadar, once a small fishing village, today represents the future that the Pakistani state aspires to: a modern, high-tech, efficiently managed centre of luxury and consumption. Its strategic location promises economic growth and inclusion within global capitalist circuits through foreign investment. Such plans erase the presence of an Indigenous mahigeer (fisherfolk) community in Gwadar, which has lived along these shores for generations and maintains an intimate relationship with its terrestrial and oceanic landscape. Their story is the focus of this research, which considers mahigeer life worlds as a critical infrastructure, as necessary to life and progress as any material infrastructure. The thesis examines how the sensory and embodied epistemologies of the mahigeer shape their values and define their relation to place and ideas of identity. It does this by paying close attention not only to what they say, but to what they do and how they do it. In doing so, the thesis considers a broader definition of literacy that encompasses oceanic knowledge and practices transmitted genealogically across generations and learned through practice.

Chapter 1 explores these sensory, spiritual, and intellectual literacies of the land and sea as embodied epistemologies. It reveals how the mahigeer sees the world as an interconnected system of biotic and abiotic forms. In such a system, the body is the central and critical point of analysis and the place from which judgments are made. The chapter explores how the practice of an oceanic epistemology challenges our modern understanding of who can make legitimate knowledge claims and what ought to be considered knowledge. Such insights have essential economic and political implications, including the key question of who participates in imagining and shaping the future.

Chapter 2 shifts focus to the land, viewed from the sea, emphasizing their deep interconnection within mahigeer epistemology. Building on Candace Fujikane’s concept of a cartography of abundance, I apply this counter-cartographic practice, which recognizes the seamless continuities among land, sea, clouds, rain, constellations, and seasons, to account for the world as experienced through the mahigeer. Sketches of abundance maps showing the bounty of the sea, the agricultural and aquatic richness of Koh-e-Batil, and the many undersea hunting sites were produced in collaboration with the mahigeer. When combined with oral histories, they reveal how place holds mahigeer genealogy, history, and spirituality, thereby shaping their sense of identity and belonging.

Chapter 3 reflects on the challenges of conducting fieldwork with Indigenous communities that are highly 1 suspicious of research and of ongoing efforts by outsiders to “study” them. Their resistance and refusals demanded a setting aside of conventional methods. Instead, an opportunity to teach photography at a local school introduced me to members of the mahigeer community who were eager to tell their own stories and document their community. As we worked together on their projects, they became epistemic partners, and we collectively constructed the contours of the research and its principal themes, priorities, and concerns. This process marked a turning point in fieldwork practice and fostered closer relations and engagement with the community. The mahigeer’s reliance on intuition, instinct, and imagination to move with and through the surrounding world required the research to be grounded in three principal practices: an active practice of listening to a world shaped by orality; sensory and embodied observation; and writing as a form of sensory practice. Stories – narrative, anecdotal, poetic – were the principal means of understanding the mahigeer’s relation to place, unveiling Gwadar as a geography of abundance and as a site of genealogy and identity. Learning to perceive and feel sensorially, and cultivating a multisensory “sight,” was required to discern the contours of the mahigeer’s sensory and embodied epistemologies.

Finally, a “speculative visual documentary” practice helped bring into view the often unremarked, yet lived, consequences of the atmospheres, fears, and anxieties circulating through the city. In conclusion, by emphasizing mahigeer oceanic epistemologies, sensory relationships, and embodied literacy, this research reveals epistemic, ecological, political, and economic imaginaries that are otherwise dismissed. The thesis argues that the mahigeer’s abundance sensibilities – a set of moral values, ethical principles, social sensibilities, and relational obligations – hold the potential to address modernity’s environmental impasse. It takes seriously the questions that the mahigeer asks of us and reflects on how these questions challenge our fundamental, modernist assumptions about ways of being and knowing.