I am a historical and political anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. My research and teaching focuses on global imperial entanglements, excess, futurity, citizenship, and everyday practices of communal life-making in the aftermath of catastrophic violence. Moreover, I am especially interested in how ethnographic practice shifts as it travels across historical and political terrains, engendering innovative modes of ethnographic experimentation and representation that trouble the discipline’s conventions.

My current book project Zones of Excess is an ethnographic monograph that examines the innovative ways through which colonial and authoritarian hauntings of community and citizenship inform and trouble how Iraqi exiles in Jordan articulate aspirations towards futurities of benevolent governance and lay claims to an ethical way of being-in-excess, as they come to be entangled with what the book frames as authoritarian and imperial-capitalist excess that characterizes their exilic condition.

This research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science and Humanities Research Council Canada (SSHRC), Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), and the Centre for Ethnography at the University of Toronto-Scarborough (UTSC), among other awards and scholarships.  

Prior to joining the Doha Institute, he was a Graduate Fellow in Ethnographic Writing with the Centre for Ethnography at UTSC and a Digital Editorial Fellow with PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Online. His work has previously appeared in Economic Anthropology, Allegra Lab, Political and Legal Anthropology Online, and Jadaliyya, among other platforms in English and Arabic. 

Email: amajeed@dohainstitute.edu.qa