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Mohammad Amir Anwar

Mohammad Amir Anwar
Name
Dr Mohammad Amir Anwar
Title
Lecturer in African Studies and International Development
Address
5.13 Chrystal Macmillan Building 15a George Square Edinburgh UK EH89LD
Telephone
+441316511731
Email
Research Interests
Globalisation, Economic Geography, African Political Economy, Digital Economy, Digital Value Creation, Future of Work, Humans of the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Digital Labour, Gig Economy, Employment/Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty, Global Governance, Digital Work, Digital ethnography, digital methodologies, Labour and labour movements, Mixed methods research in social sciences, information economy, Social media and internet technologies, Storytelling and ethnography, Identity Politics, Development studies
URL
http://www.cas.ed.ac.uk/people/core_staff/mohammad_amir_anwar

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Biography

Mohammad is a Lecturer in African Studies and International Development. He is also a Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Digital Economy and Society, and a Research Associate at the School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg. He holds a Ph.D in Geography from Trinity College Dublin. He has extensive experience of conducting research both in India and Africa.

Before coming to Edinburgh, Mohammad was a Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where he was a part of the ERC-funded project Geonet: investigating the changing connectivities and potentials of Sub-Saharan Africa’s knowledge economy. The project examined the geographies, drivers, and effects of Africa’s emerging information economies at a time of changing connectivity and Internet access across the region. As a part of the project, I lead the research on digital outsourcing and gig economy in Africa. To this end, he conducted a year-long fieldwork in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda, conducting in-depth interviews with remote gig workers, call centre agents, business owners, self-employed digital entrepreneurs, social enterprises, private sector associations, government officials, and industry experts. At Oxford, he taught a Masters course on Economic Development in Digital Capitalism. 

Before joining the OII he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). At UJ, his work examined at the political economy of India’s engagements in Africa. He also briefly worked as a Research Assistant at Trinity College Dublin, for an Irish Research Council funded project on the role of information and communication technologies in enterprise development and industrial change in Africa.

His work has appeared in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals, such as Environment and Planning A, Review of African Political Economy, Competition and Change, African Geographical Review, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, First Monday, and Urban Forum. Peer-reviewed book chapters have been published by Sage and Cambridge University Press. He regularly contributes to public debate through blogs, articles for online news sources, and radio interviews. His articles have appeared in New Statesman and The Conversation. 

Mohammad has received funding from the Foundation of Urban and Regional Studies and more recently Knowledge Exchange and Impact Acceleration Award from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) UK. His PhD was funded through Trinity Research Studentship, Trinity College, University of Dublin.

   Journal articles

      Other

      Media Articles/Internet publications

  • ANWAR, M.A. (2019)  Most call centre jobs are a dead end for South Africa’s youth. The Conversation.
  • ANWAR, M.A. (2018)  How Marx predicted the worst effects of the gig economy more than 150 years ago.. New Statesman.
  • ANWAR, M.A. (2017)  Obsession with growth won’t help South Africa’s economic recovery.. The Conversation.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2017)  White people in South Africa still hold the lion’s share of all forms of capital. The Conversation.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2016)  Low income and high competition: digital jobs in a neoliberal age. Union Solidarity International.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2015)  The lesser known story of India’s role in Ethiopian land deals. The Conversation.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2015)  Why south-south co-operation is a myth when it comes to BRICS and Africa. The Conversation.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2014)  UN Security Council’s failure stretches from Syria to Crimea. The Conversation.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2013)  Book Review of: A. Mace (2013) City Suburbs: Placing Suburbia in a Post-suburban World, London: Routledge.. Royal Geographical Society, IBG Urban Geography Research Group.
  • Anwar, M.A. (2011)  Book Review of: Banerjee-Guha, S. (2010) Accumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the new Global Order, Sage. Royal Geographical Society, IBG Urban Geography Research Group.