Lamia Karim

Lamia Karim is Professor of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, specializing in women, work, neoliberalism, state politics, NGOs, and Islam in Bangladesh and South Asia. With over twenty-five years of field research experience, she critically examines how global capital targets poor women through garment labor and microfinance systems.

Her academic credentials include:

• B.A. from Brandeis University (1984)
• M.A. from the University of Michigan (1993)
• Ph.D. from Rice University (2002)

Dr. Karim's research interrogates the gendered violence of neoliberal development, revealing how Bangladeshi women navigate contradictory pressures from global capital, religious movements, and state policies. Her ethnographic approach exposes the human costs behind microfinance 'success' narratives and garment industry growth, particularly focusing on bodily autonomy, debt bondage, and emergent subjectivities among marginalized women. She challenges Western feminist assumptions by centering local epistemologies and resistance strategies.

Analysis of her publications shows consistent engagement with South Asian political economy, evolving from microfinance critiques to contemporary examinations of AI's impact on labor. Her work demonstrates increasing interdisciplinary reach, connecting anthropology with gender studies, development theory, and technology studies while maintaining rigorous ethnographic grounding in Bangladesh.

Significant recognitions include:

• University of Oregon's Provost Book Publication Award (2023) for Castoffs of Capital
• Society of Cultural Anthropology's Gregory Bateson Book Prize Honorable Mention (2022)
• Fulbright Fellowship and Wenner-Gren Foundation support
• Faculty Fellowship at Humboldt University's Institute for Labor Studies

Her research has secured major funding from the National Science Foundation and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. While no longer accepting graduate students, her mentorship legacy continues through former advisees in anthropology and gender studies. Current work explores AI's reconstruction of work lives through her Ethnography as Collage project, examining intersections of gender, race, and class in technological transformation.

Though no formal lab structure is documented, her collaborative approach bridges anthropology, South Asian studies, and digital humanities through the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages and SAIL (South Asia Institute at Oregon).