As we honour South Asian Heritage Month, we celebrate not only vibrant cultural traditions but also the scholars and thinkers whose work shapes our understanding of the region’s histories, futures, and lived experiences. This year, South Asian Heritage Month returns with the theme ‘Roots to Routes’, a powerful exploration of the journeys, histories, and identities of people with roots in South Asian countries. 

Dr. Omer Aijazi of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), a transdisciplinary anthropologist of Pakistani heritage, has been immersed in the disputed territory of Kashmir since 2010—first as a humanitarian worker and later as a researcher. His work is grounded in long-term engagement with communities living near the Line of Control, the 740km long militarized boundary that slices Kashmir into Pakistan-held and Indian-held areas. Known as Asia’s Berlin Wall, this de facto border fractures families, neighbors, and ancestral lands, with crossing remaining nearly impossible for most people. These lush Himalayan landscapes bear the weight of recurring environmental disasters, political violence, and ceaseless militarized surveillance. Within this complex terrain, the people of Kashmir continue to assert their right to self-determination.

Aijazi’s ethnographic inquiry, most recently captured in his multi-award-winning book, Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir, frames the violence in these mountainscapes not as isolated rupture but as an ambient, persistent presence—one that permeates all life yet also generates new ways of being. His focus rests on repair rather than trauma, illuminating how people sustain themselves amidst a diffuse force that shapes every breath, step, and relationship, transforming fractured zones into spaces of possibility.

Rooted in decolonial traditions, Aijazi’s scholarship challenges extractive tendencies within humanitarian and academic institutions—the impulse to regard communities primarily as sources of data for policy or publication. “People are epistemic authorities, creators of theory, knowledge, and critique in their own right, not merely evidence,” he insists.  “Our inquiry, then, must be relational, grounded in genuine connection and accountability with those we learn from. This is needed to uphold Kashmiri people’s quest for self-determination: sovereignty: freedom.”

Aijazi’s academic writing—his book most notably—embraces an intimate, lyrical, elegiac style that blurs the lines between scholarly work, poetic memoir, and creative nonfiction. It unsettles traditional ethnographic authority, privileging listening, sensing, and partiality. More than a conventional argument, it unfolds like a ceremony, an offering.

In line with these scholarly and ethical commitments, Aijazi has developed and taught a new module titled Decolonizing Disaster Studies, offered to upper-year undergraduates at HCRI. Students immerse themselves in critical thought—from abolitionist, Black, Indigenous, and decolonial perspectives—to not only rethink their future roles as humanitarians but also to uncover alternative frameworks for understanding and responding to contemporary disasters and crises. Launched last semester, students brought their learning to life through photographic exhibitions, soundscapes, sculptures, poetry, and collages as part of their formal assessments.

This September, supported by the Hallsworth Conference Fund, Aijazi, alongside collaborators Drs. Junyoung Verónica Kim (New York University) and Naveen Minai (Wesleyan University), will welcome an international group of scholars to Manchester to reconceptualize borders and partitions across Asia, seeking to fully comprehend the global infrastructures of war, imperialism, environmental degradation, and inequality.

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