Mishal Khan

Team

Mishal Khan is a sociologist working on global histories of labour governance, the intersections of race and capitalism, and the political economy of slavery and abolition in South Asia and the broader British empire. Mishal’s work leverages an in-depth understanding of the legal, social, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century to critically analyse contemporary labour governance, precarity and dispossession across the global North and South, and debates around modern slavery, trafficking, and the future of work.

Mishal holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago and has a BA in international studies and political science from Macalester College. Her publications include Abolition as a Racial Project: Erasures and Racializations on the Borders of British India, The Indebted Among the “Free”: Producing Indian Labor through the Layers of Racial Capitalism, and Imperial Anti-Trafficking: Producing Racialized Knowledge Regimes over the Longue Durée. For a full list of publications, see here.

As a postdoctoral fellow for the Fairwork U.S. team, Mishal is involved in coordinating research, building partnerships, and publishing and disseminating the Fairwork US reports based on fieldwork conducted with support from the Ford Foundation.