Ilqua Lutfi
Comparative Human Development
Ilqua Lutfi is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines how everyday interactions between domestic workers and employers make and unmake gendered class relations, revealing the moral, spatial, and affective underpinnings of inequality in contemporary urban Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Ilqua recently returned from year-long fieldwork in Karachi conducted throughout 2024, where she used participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how workers and employers navigate moral obligations across profound social divides, creating a complex terrain where class relations are constantly renegotiated through ordinary encounters. She is interested in how care becomes a way of managing relationships in conditions shaped by inequality. Her work examines how people move through daily routines—offering care, making requests, refusing support—in ways that carry ethical weight but unfold within deeply unequal relationships. She is particularly interested in how domestic space shapes these interactions, and how everyday negotiations around care reflect not only material need but ethical imagination. Ilqua holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago’s MAPSS program and a BA in South Asian Studies and Global Development Studies from the University of Virginia. Her work engages with questions of inequality, care, gender, and everyday ethics in South Asian contexts.