Dr. Aiman Mustafa is an Assistant Professor of Law at NALSAR. His teaching interests focus on the intersection of his previous research and on the social study of processes of norm-making, of which modern legal systems are a particular kind.
Dr. Mustafa teaches introductory sociology and the sociology of law to undergraduate students. His current teaching has informed a growing interest in issues of legal pluralism, gender, and ethnic identity.
Before joining NALSAR, he taught undergraduate students at Emory University, Atlanta, and MA and BA courses at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His work engages with debates in social theory, state-formation, ethnic studies, gender, mass media, political economy, and democracy.
Dr. Mustafa has studied the socio-cultural processes that shape the historically changing nature of ethnic and national groups. He has examined how such processes are boundary-forming and enable the “us-them” distinctions at the core of group formation. His interdisciplinary orientation speaks to the concerns of anthropology, sociology, legal studies, and history, explaining the cultural politics that mark inter-group dynamics, including those of modern nation-states.
Dr. Mustafa has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai for nearly a decade, with brief interludes in Delhi and Hyderabad. As part of this fieldwork, he has worked extensively across a range of settings and organisations—newsrooms, socio-religious settings, feminist organisations, political parties, and courtrooms. Portions of his field materials formed the basis for his dissertation research in Cultural Anthropology at Emory University.
His dissertation fieldwork research won an international grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He is currently developing his previous research into a book project, In the Shadow of the Majority: Cultural Politics, Community, and State-Formation in Postcolonial Mumbai.