Sarah Suhail is a scholar, human rights lawyer, activist, and community organizer, focusing mainly on land, labor, women, and queer rights.

Research: 

Her research is on collective struggles as narrated by life stories of women who have escaped bonded labor in Sindh, describing their conditions of carceral labor and their strategies and tools of escape. These stories I read alongside the stories of Khawaja Sira Gurus from Lahore which described their lives under the complex gender regime that governs life in Punjab. The larger project that explores the tools and strategies of resistance used by people relegated to the margins of society by the conception of their womanness as loss. 

She aims to delve deeper into the life stories of landless Dalit women and Khawaja Siras to deconstruct the operating gender regime and reveal the underlying and pervasive social understanding of womanness as loss. This is an intervention from the grassroots on how minoritization, exclusion, and disposability of certain people lies at the heart of the Pakistani Nationalist project, not unlike the competing majoritarian nationalisms in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar each with their distinctive histories and attendant violent expressions.

She situates her work at the intersection of gender, caste, labor, and South Asian studies even as the work is highly local and with communities in struggle. Its import is broader as these stories lay out paths for a different future being possible even in the constraints of the here and now. 

Movement work and Teaching: 

Sarah started her work as a movement lawyer in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2008, working with land and water rights movements in Southern Punjab, with indigenous fisher folk of the southern Indus, farmers within the peasant movement in Punjab, and those working to preserve the use of lands held in common; Hari women who escaped bonded labor in Sindh and Khawaja Sira and trans and queer communities struggling to survive the gender regime in Lahore. Along with her activist and research work, she has taught at the undergraduate level since 2008. Beginning at the Institute for Legal Studies (TILS) in Lahore, then to the larger universities in the city, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore University of Management Sciences, and finally, Information Technology University (ITU). She has taught in the fields of law, gender studies, Cultural studies, Justice Studies, Asian Asian American Studies, Sociology, and South Asian history, bringing together the intersections of land and labor rights, queer politics, feminist methodologies, and a deep grounding in the histories of multiple regions as they are impacted by colonialism, settler and neo-colonialism and multiple forms of imperialisms. She is also an advocate of the Lahore High Court and works as a free-lance advocate for refugees in the global north. She currently lives between Phoenix and Lahore.

This website is dedicated to stories of and from struggles she has been a part of and /or she's recorded. It has elements of her movement work, research, and teaching work, which are all intertwined and weave through the lives of many other organizers, political workers, women human rights defenders, and others.