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Selfie of Asha Sawhney, an adult person with a medium-light skin tone and long dark hair.

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Asha Sawhney

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Asha Sawhney is a part-time lecturer in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where she is working on her doctoral dissertation project on transnational migration to and through the Americas. Her work sits at the intersection of the studies of migration, urban spaces, and social movements, with a particular regional focus on both Latin America and South Asia. She is committed to South-South analysis and exploration of the uneven terrain produced by the global political economy. 

Publications

Sawhney, Asha, "Naanwais and Non-Citizens: The Political Economy of Afghan Migrant Infrastructures in Delhi," Urban Matters Journal, 2023; Sawhney, Asha and Jose Atiles (equal co-authors), "Dispossession by Production: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Covid-19 Resource Shortages in India and Puerto Rico," New Political Economy, 2025

Exhibitions

Co-curator of the 1-ness to 1-Identity Exhibition at the National Museum of India in New Delhi 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course will situate current transnational migration phenomena among the larger history of migration from the colonial era to today. We will wrestle with how to study migration in an era of unprecedented migrant mobility as well as a global rise in xenophobic, right-wing, and nationalist political movements. Changes in the social trajectory of migrants, as well as the study of migration, will be explored, such as the transition from forced and settler-colonial migration to post-colonial migration, the assimilationist perspective to the transnational migration approach to multi-stage migration, transit migration, and donkey routes that take today¿s migrants through a variety of countries on a quest for a better life.

Class Number

2385

Credits

3

Description

Since the 2010s, social and political upheavals ranging from anti-globalization campaigns, Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, Arab uprisings, feminist movements, and anti-corruption movements have become a daily part of social media engagement and viewing. This course will ask why people rebel when they do. What are the institutions that social movements rise up against? Why do non-elites choose uprising in place of ¿ordinary¿ political engagement? Why do some succeed and others fail?

Class Number

2361

Credits

3