LUMS Live: Helping the Community Stay Connected and Informed

A majority of the world is confined to their homes as a result of the rapid spread of the Coronavirus. Classes at LUMS have also been moved online with majority of the staff and faculty working from home. However, just as LUMS has not let the current situation stop the students learning, it has also found a new way of keeping important conversations going.

LUMS Live, launched on March 29, 2020, is a platform that gives you the opportunity to tune in and connect with Dr. Arshad Ahmad, Vice Chancellor, LUMS and other eminent panelists as they discuss important topics. Discussions during these live sessions, hosted on the LUMS official Facebook page and moderated by Adeel Hashmi, cover topics from how to maintain good health, how to continue learning in the current environment and the changing role of technology to how to stay positive and the importance of being generous and empathetic to the people around us.

Explore our past sessions, and be sure to join us for the next session and become part of critical conversations during these unprecedented times.

LUMS Live Session 110: The Net of Kinship: Mothers, Daughters, and the Webs of Caste in Pakistan

Dr. Ghazal Asif Farrukhi argues that the hard labour of sustaining the nets of kinship within which one is caught can often lead to exhaustion, even in the most intimate of embodied relations. This discussion will explore how the tensions and intimacies of a mother-daughter relationship may, in the context of deep-seated casteist and religious prejudice, help reveal the logics, practices, and compromises through which women mediate family, profession, and personal ambition.

Hosted in collaboration with the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative (SWGI), the session was moderated by Dr. Amen Jaffer.

LUMS Live Session 109: Cultural Preservation in Pakistan

Pakistan is endowed with a large number of ancient sites and historical structures, which provide Pakistanis with a distinct cultural identity. Over recent history, cumulative efforts of the Government, NGOs and others have been targeted to preserve this heritage. This panel discussion focuses on current efforts of the preservation of visual culture through restorations and the use of modern technology in different parts of Pakistan.

Hosted in collaboration with the Technology for People Initiative (TPI), the session was moderated by Ms. Fatima Bilquis.

LUMS Live Session 108: Social Experiments to Fight Poverty: From Research to Policy

Dr. Esther Duflo received the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. She is one of the pioneers of the use of randomised controlled trials to study the effects of development policies.

Hosted in collaboration with the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC) as part of their Mahbub ul Haq Distinguished Lecture Series, this session was moderated by Dr. Ali Cheema and Dr. Farah Said.

LUMS Live Session 107: Promoting Gender Justice on Global Garment Supply Chains

COVID-19 has intervened in unanticipated ways across all sectors, with devastating impacts for the women workers who dominate the Asian garment industry. Across Asia—which accounts for 60% of the 40 million garment workers worldwide—women workers have been left in desperate circumstances requiring immediate and long-term responses. Women garment workers—including those who have returned to work and those who are unable to do so—face a spectrum of gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH), including forms of violence that inflict physical, mental, sexual, and economic harm. Governments and brands have failed to avert and relieve this urgent humanitarian crisis and specifically have failed to include a gender lens even in limited response.

This panel provides a detailed overview of GBVH in garment supply chains, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also lays out critical actions needed from global fashion brands and governments going forward to mitigate the human rights impact in the short term and to transform supply chains going forward.

Hosted in collaboration with the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative (SWGI), the session was moderated by Ms. Nandita Shivakumar.

LUMS Live Session 106: The Rise of Populism in South Asia

India has long held an exceptional status as the most consolidated democracy in the developing world. However, this status is now seen as at risk by the government of Narendra Modi. His governing projects are associated with intolerance toward minorities and dissenters and exhibit centralizing authoritarian tendencies. To understand the rise of right populism in India, Professor Chhibber reflects on an earlier period of the 1960s and early 1970s when Indira Gandhi launched a populist campaign of the left against the entrenched power structures of the Congress party in India. The panelists explore the relationship between the left populists in the 1970s and the right populists in the 2010s whether there are differences in the authoritarian practices of left and right populists.

Hosted in collaboration with the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC) as part of their Mahbub ul Haq Distinguished Lecture Series, the session was moderated by Dr. Shandana Khan Mohmand and Dr. Hassan Javid.

LUMS Live Session 105: Is Teaching a Profession in Pakistan?

Across Pakistan, there are 500+ education programmes, with a significant proportion of them dedicated to the preparation of school teachers. However, since 2012 onwards, most sub-national governments in Pakistan have chosen to opt out of mandating a professional teaching background/certification for recruitment into public school teaching. Private schools in the country already do not require pre-service certification. All this while, Pakistan continues to perform poorly on fundamental literacy and numeracy tests.

So why do education systems that do perform well focus so much on pre-service teacher education as a key component of education policy and practice? Is there merit to professional teacher preparation that our system might be overlooking? And what does Pakistan’s contrasting position tell us about how professionally teaching is approached in our schools? This third session of our month-long teacher dialogue series focuses on some of these fundamental questions as we reflect on historical and current lessons from teacher preparation policies around the world and their lessons for Pakistan.

Hosted in collaboration with the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education and the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC), the session was moderated by Dr. Soufia Siddiqi.

LUMS Live Session 104: The Economics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poor Countries

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended health and living standards around the world. This discussion provide overview of these effects, with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Economists have explained how the pandemic is likely to have different consequences for LMICs, and demanded distinct policy responses, compared to rich countries. The pandemic’s many adverse economic and noneconomic effects in terms of living standards, education, health, and gender equality appear to be unprecedented in scope and scale. This session also reviews research on successful and failed policy responses, including the failure to ensure widespread vaccine coverage in many LMICs. Vaccines are changing the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in grossly uneven ways. The poorest countries continue to face considerable obstacles in both receiving and distributing doses. To limit virus transmission, its devastating impacts, and opportunities for further mutations, this must change. Until it does, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masking must remain a priority.

Hosted in collaboration with the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC) as part of their Mahbub Ul Haq Distinguished Lecture Series, the session was moderated by Ms. Maha Rehman and Dr. Ali Cheema.

LUMS Live Session 103: Censorship, Progressive Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India & Pakistan

Censorship, Urdu literature, Islam, and progressive secular nationalisms in colonial India and Pakistan have a complex, intertwined history. Dr. Waheed offers a timely examination of the role of progressive Muslim intellectuals in the Pakistan movement. She delves into how these left-leaning intellectuals drew from long-standing literary traditions of Islam in a period of great duress and upheaval, complicating our understanding of the relationship between religion and secularism. Rather than seeing 'religion' and 'the secular' as distinct and oppositional phenomena, this book demonstrates how these concepts themselves were historically produced in South Asia and were deeply interconnected in the cultural politics of the left. Through a detailed analysis of trials for blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition, and feminist writers, Dr. Waheed argues that Muslim intellectuals engaged with socialism and communism through their distinctive ethical and cultural past. In so doing, she provides a fresh perspective on the creation of Pakistan and South Asian modernity.

Hosted in collaboration with the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative (SWGI), the session was moderated by Dr. Ali Raza.

LUMS Live Session 102: Where is a Teacher’s Community?

Teachers in Pakistan spend 90 percent of time in the classroom, whereas in developed educational systems teachers spend 60 -70 percent of their working time in the classroom and 30-40 percent of time in non-teaching activities to improve instruction. What is the significance of non-teaching communal activities to the continuous professional learning of teachers in schools, and why?

This webinar explores the identification, construction and inevitable transformation of spaces through which teachers define themselves and their learning environments. The session will reflect on the opportunities and challenges experienced through processes of collaborative learning, mentoring, and communities of practice (whether online or in person).

When a teacher asks, where is my community and why do I need one, are they taking the first steps towards professional development and their school’s improvement? Where are the spaces and opportunities for teachers to exercise their agency and to form a professional (individual and collective) identity with an ultimate objective of enhancing their practice? What forms, if at all, do those spaces take in the education ecosystem in Pakistan? Does public or private sector do it better when it comes to in-service continuous professional learning of teachers? What are the global lessons for Pakistan in that regard?

Hosted in collaboration with the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education and the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC), the session was moderated by Dr. Gulab Khan.

LUMS Live Session 101: Development and Contention: Energy Politics in the Contemporary Era

The preceding two decades have been characterised by the emergence of considerable protest and contention around issues of energy access. Riots, protests, sit-ins, and other forms of mobilisation are frequent occurrences in response to energy pricing, access, and availability in both the Global North and South. The literature around energy is dominated by technocratic and economistic approaches, pertaining to the creation of more efficient energy markets and resolving bottlenecks in development agendas. However, there is a need to garner a more holistic perspective on energy that relates it to the lived reality of citizens across the world.

This panel brings together academics who study energy from a social scientific perspective, reflecting on the centrality of energy in political and social life and what that tells us about state-society relations in the 21st century.　

Hosted in collaboration with the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC) as part of their Political Economy of Development Series, the session was moderated by Dr. Umair Javed.