Usman Mahar
PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher; Project Manager, MSCA Doctoral Network MITIME
Anthropology of migration, affect and temporalities
History, Culture and Communication Studies
Faculty of Humanities
I am a social and cultural anthropologist working at the intersection of critical migration studies and the anthropology of affect and temporality. My research examines how people build lives under precarious, temporary and revocable conditions, particularly across Pakistan and Central Europe under the condition of deportability. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Humanities, and also hold the position of Project Manager for the MITIME MSCA Doctoral Network led by the University of Oulu.
I previously worked as a researcher on PRIME, the Horizon Europe project on the rights of irregular migrants, at the University of St. Gallen, and was a visiting postdoc at LMU. My work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) and Social Analysis, and I recently led a co-edited special issue of JEMS (2026) on migration categories.
Research interests
- Migration: categorisation of migrants; irregularised migration; deportation; return
- Borders and Affect: deportability; temporality; precarity; irregularisation; immobility; alternative understandings of mobility