Anum Pasha Syed

Welcome! I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at the George Washington University, where I also co-direct the Politics and Values Program, a living and learning community on GW's Mount Vernon Campus. 

My research sits at the intersection of political science, social movements, and political psychology. I study how social boundaries form and reinforce exclusion, and how everyday experiences of marginalization can spark collective action. To explore these questions, I draw on a mix of qualitative fieldwork, interpretive methods, and survey experiments. 

My current book project examines why and how transnational ties shape the formation of immigrant groups and their political engagement in the host context. Specifically, I look at how some South Asian immigrants in the U.S. have mobilized the Dalit identity—the lowest stratum of the caste hierarchy—to advocate for explicit legal protections against caste-based discrimination, an otherwise invisible form of bias. 

This project grows out of my PhD dissertation, which was awarded the Byran Jackson Dissertation Research on Minority Politics Award by the APSA Urban and Local Politics Section (2024). This work has been supported by the Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs at APSA and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research.

I received my PhD in Political Science from George Washington University and BSc in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

You can reach me at anumsyed@gwu.edu.