Ume Abeeha

Programme: BS SSLA
Year: 2022

I am currently in my senior year, majoring in psychology. I have always been interested in marketing and brand management and wish to pursue further studies in Applied Psychology and Marketing in the future. It was because of my passion and interests that I decided to base my final year thesis project on neuromarketing, a newly developed intersection of marketing principles and applied psychology. I have worked as a Research Assistant at IBA, and done Research Internship with Shehri-CBE. I have also worked as an MTO Marketing at Audionic- The Sound Master. My other interests include reading self-help and fantasy books as well. Occasionally, I also like to read a good satirical book if I can find one, and Twinkle Khanna's Mrs. Funnybones is one of my favorites. I aspire to become a writer myself. Apart from all this, I also love creating digital content on social media platforms, mindful meditation. When I get some time off, I also like to play tennis and badminton.

My thesis project is focused on the analysis of emotional instigation as a result of exposure to certain advertisements of Fairness Creams in women using neuromarketing research tools such as Facial Action Coding and Eye Tracking. This project is the next step to traditional marketing research methodologies and practices such as surveys and focus groups. Neuromarketing allows researchers to see beyond the black box of customers; the unconscious thought processes and reactions. This does raise ethical considerations when it comes to participants' rights, and hence I plan to minimize such threats with a great focus on ethical guidelines pertaining to conducting experiments involving neuromarketing tools.

Shameem Bano

Programme: BS Social Sciences and Liberal Arts
Year: 2018-2022

I am a final year student majoring in Political Science, and my research interests include politics, public policy, Constitutional and provincial rights of citizens. Special interest lies in the politics of Gilgit-Baltistan and its ambiguous political situation and denied constitutional and political rights of the region. Currently doing my final year thesis on the perception of youth of Gilgit-Baltistan on the current political situation of the region. I am a TA and RA at IBA and do reading, freelancing, cycling and play volley ball in leisure time.

Sameen Ahmed

Program: SSLA
Year: 2022

My area of interest involves looking at 'animal rescue' in Karachi's urban centers. These 'rescues' involve dogs, cats, and sometimes birds such as pigeons and kites. With a focus on these animal bodies inhabiting Karachi, I wish to critically look at how social relations are being forged, remade, and also broken – that is, if at all.

I also find the social exchange and intimacy between the 'rescued' and the 'rescuer' to be of great personal interest. Gendered and feminist in nature, I am of the opinion that the animal 'rescue' phenomenon provides a unique space for us to envision an alternate reality - something that I intend to explore in detail through my research.

Asmat Ullah Khan

Program: SSLA
Year: 4th

Asmat Ullah is a senior year of SSLA majoring in political science. This has been his passion to understand politics around water in KPK through the prism of environmental anthropology. He is pursuing his ethnographic research on "Politics and patronage on the waters of Gomal canal" in the northern province of Pakistan through an eco-political perspective. The study highlights the unfair water management of the Gomal Canal. He tries to understand how scarcity gave the stakeholders and political elites an edge to exploit the dynamics of shared waters.

This paper aims to understand how the politics and patronage of the waters of the Gomal canal in the remote region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, are creating social inequality and letting the poor landholders suffer the effects of water shortage. The research highlights how the political and local elites of the area get benefit from the Canal water. The local politicians and landlords are ancestral beneficiaries of the governmental resources, which are actually allocated for the people of these areas. These elites live in cities, and some of their family members reside in the villages to oversee land and look after crops. Moreover, they occupy lucrative jobs in the public sector. Although, these landlords' land is located at the end of the Warren canal, however, they take all of the water from the canal and irrigate their land to the total capacity.

Wara Irfan

Program: BS Social Sciences and Liberal Arts
Year: Final Year

Wara Irfan is a senior at the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at IBA, Karachi. She is majoring in Media and Cultural Studies and her research interests primarily lie within fields of media cultures and their interaction with different communities. She is an avid fan of films and television shows from across the globe. Currently, she is interested in dubbing cultures and foreign dubbed films and TV shows. In her free time, you are most likely to find her binge-watching Ru Paul's Drag Race.

Her final year thesis project unpacks the ways Pakistani women spectators interact with Turkish TV dramas in their Urdu dubbed form. Her research is concerned with how middle-class Pakistani female subjectivity negotiates, resists, and reinforces its subject position upon encountering Turkish TV dramas. She is conducting in-depth interviews with people involved in the local production and distribution of the dubbed Turkish TV dramas such as dubbing artists, translators, scriptwriters, distributors, etc. Furthermore, to learn how female spectators derive pleasure from consuming foreign cultural products, she is engaging in conversations with middle-class Pakistani female viewers of Turkish TV dramas.