This panel brought together grounded accounts of how communities across Pakistan experienced and responded to the everyday realities of the climate crisis. Through diverse formats—from documentary storytelling to qualitative research and policy analysis—the panel highlighted the entangled effects of environmental degradation, gendered precarity, and systemic neglect. It traced how climate change intensified existing inequalities, particularly for children, women, and indigenous communities, while also surfacing stories of resilience, adaptation, and care. From monsoon brides and child fishers to the vanishing livelihoods of the Indus Delta, these narratives revealed both the fragility and resistance that shaped life on the frontlines of ecological collapse. Collectively, the panel called for urgent, justice-centered approaches to climate response that centered lived experience, community knowledge, and intergenerational agency.

This panel explored how Pakistan’s urban landscapes were shaped by exclusionary development, securitized governance, and struggles for belonging. It brought together visual, historical, and empirical inquiries into housing demolitions in Karachi, smog and spatial degradation in Lahore, securitization of Hazara neighborhoods in Quetta, and policy attitudes toward energy and climate. These contributions highlighted how urban planning, militarized authority, and state violence intersected to marginalize working-class and minority communities, often under the guise of progress or security. At the same time, the panel reviewed powerful narratives of everyday resistance—from Hazara youth reclaiming identity through photovoice to women leading housing protests. Using participatory visual research, survey experiments, and legal-historical analysis, these projects critically examined how cities reflected deeper structural inequities while remaining sites of agency, contestation, and potential transformation.

This panel examined how displacement, precarity, and structural abandonment shaped the everyday lives of marginalized communities in Pakistan’s urban and border regions. It brought into focus Afghan refugees in Peshawar, child laborers at the Torkham border, stateless Bengali workers in Karachi’s Machar Colony, and evicted communities grappling with identity, legality, and survival. The panel traced how these groups were rendered visible through exploitation yet invisible to policy, protection, and public discourse. Whether through deportation drives, border militarization, or the denial of legal recognition, state practices framed these populations as security threats, economic burdens, or expendable labor. At the same time, the panel foregrounded voices from the margins—documenting how individuals and communities contested erasure through informal resistance, tactical silence, and survival labor. These contributions, spanning investigative reporting, ethnographic fieldwork, and visual storytelling, offered a sobering but necessary engagement with the human costs of state power, legal liminality, and systemic neglect in Pakistan’s shadow zones.

This panel explored how education systems in Pakistan were shaped by climate disasters, structural inequity, and evolving models of leadership and access. It brought together studies on flood-impacted schools in Sindh, voucher-based access schemes in Punjab, and leadership practices in rural private schools. The panel highlighted how crises—both environmental and systemic—disrupted continuity and deepened educational exclusion, especially for marginalized students. It also examined emergent forms of social justice leadership and the potential of community-centered responses. A civic education pilot project in urban public schools demonstrated how student-led clubs fostered civic engagement and climate literacy, while expanding notions of leadership and responsibility. A documentary on instrument-making and musical mentorship offered a powerful counterpoint—highlighting informal, intergenerational forms of education, creativity, and shared meaning-making that often went unrecognized in formal systems. From ethnographic assessments and grounded theory to mixed-method policy analysis and creative storytelling, these contributions showed both the fragility and the transformative potential of education in times of crisis. The panel invited discussion on policy and practice in creating equitable, climate-resilient, and context-sensitive educational futures.

This panel explored how legal systems in Pakistan functioned as both instruments of control and arenas for contestation. It engaged with the complex interplay between law, identity, and governance—examining how legal frameworks shaped access to rights, reproduced inequity, and became spaces for resistance. The discussion spanned environmental governance, urban displacement, gendered exclusions, and recognition politics, highlighting the everyday negotiations and power dynamics embedded within legal encounters. The panel reflected on how people navigated legal institutions to challenge dispossession, assert dignity, and reimagine justice—especially in contexts where formal mechanisms fell short. From constitutional courts to community-based dispute resolution, these contributions offered insights into both the limits and the emancipatory possibilities of the law.

This panel examined how labor, mobility, and economic policy intersected to shape structural precarity in contemporary Pakistan. It engaged with diverse sites of economic activity—from the textile factories of Nooriabad to rural-urban remittance corridors—unpacking how historical legacies, legal frameworks, and institutional failures continued to define patterns of inequality. Drawing from mixed-method and empirical research, the panel investigated gaps in labor protections, food insecurity, and the gendered impacts of underpaid work. It foregrounded the lived realities of workers—internal migrants, child laborers, and informal employees—while also tracing global flows of remittances through cultural, linguistic, and geographic proximity. Together, these presentations argued that economic vulnerability in Pakistan was not incidental but embedded in policy omissions, weak enforcement, and deep-rooted historical structures. By highlighting these dynamics, the panel called for reimagining labor rights, social protections, and redistribution through the lens of justice and structural reform.

This panel engaged with questions of identity, marginalization, and creative resistance through documentary storytelling. From Karachi to Kashmir, it brought together narratives that reimagined belonging outside dominant social and political frameworks. The films explored the lived realities of individuals and communities often rendered invisible—whether through disability, displacement, or territorial erasure. Through theatre, craft, and oral histories, these stories reflected how art became a mode of survival, memory, and protest.

This panel examined how climate change, social norms, and emerging technologies were reshaping health experiences and responses in South Asia. Papers spanned from regional analyses of climate-induced malnutrition to sociocultural determinants of maternal health in Karachi, and the growing use of generative AI as a health resource for young people in Pakistan. Drawing on mixed-methods and systems approaches, the panel explored how overlapping vulnerabilities—ecological, structural, and digital—were negotiated in everyday health-seeking.

This panel brought together critical feminist inquiries into the political agency, resistance, and infrastructural creativity of women in Pakistan’s historically marginalized regions. From the post-merger tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the contested terrains of Balochistan, and the digitally excluded Pashtun communities of the northwest, the papers traced how women negotiated cultural constraints, displacement, and state neglect to assert leadership and build alternative systems of belonging. The presentations examined gender disparities in political participation, the emergence of grassroots feminist thought in Balochistan, and the formation of “feminist digital infrastructures” among displaced Pashtun women. Together, they interrogated colonial legacies, patriarchy, and state violence while foregrounding women as agents of structural change, reimagining power from the peripheries.

This panel focused on the exploration of religious identity, trauma, and the co-existence of communities in Pakistan. It reflected on a rare instance of shared spaces and religious unity in Sindh, in defiance of polarizing discourse that dominated society. Using creative storytelling, it explored the intersection of caste, faith, and labor discrimination. It examined the impact of religious persecution and outlined how systemic discrimination shaped spiritual detachment, moral injury, and psychosocial trauma. Together, this panel curated a textured conversation about how faith—whether expressed through lived coexistence or endured as marginalization—shaped bodies, beliefs, and belonging in contemporary Pakistan.