Lalaie Ameeriar received an Honors B.A. in Socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto, and a Masters degree and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work draws on feminist ethnography, critical studies of globalization, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory to examine the transnational labor migrations of Pakistani women between Karachi, Pakistan and Toronto, Canada. She is interested in questions of nationalism, multiculturalism, state formation, and women’s agency. Her work is based on 24 months of ethnographic research in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan, and Toronto, Canada between 2001 and 2007. She examines both contradictions in Canadian models of multiculturalism (in which liberalism becomes a rallying point in the configuration of a Canadian national identity) as well as the ways Canadian multicultural logic unfolds in global processes. Integration in Canada represents not the erasure of all differences, but the production, selection and celebration of some differences and the erasure of others.
Lalaie has been a dissertation fellow at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She has also taught courses in the Department of Anthropology and the Stanford Program in Feminist Studies.