Profile
Dr. Sanaullah Khan is a scholar of global security and wellbeing. He is broadly interested in exploring how humans heal under conditions of inequality, war and conflict. In his research and teaching, he investigates notions of medical efficacy as well as varying epistemologies of illness and health in globalized, displaced and securitized settings.
His PhD research project, War Medicine: Suspicion and Mental Illness in a Garrison State, explores the disciplining and concealment of combat trauma in militarized Pakistan. He is expanding this research into the moral logics that states invoke to render invisible injuries sustained in global wars (with a focus on the Middle East and South Asia). As part of this line of inquiry, Dr. Khan also actively engages with topics of religious revivalism, secularism, piety and surveillance. He is interested in expanding his research into new comparative domains that explore the global logics of inequality. He has also studied the impacts of substance use, policing, recovery, incarceration and inequality in Baltimore, and has studied health inequities, policing and displacement in Akron and Cleveland.
He is also interested in investigating de-carceral and non-biomedical epistemologies toward healing. Based on his work with healers in Pakistan, he is interested in using indigenous categories to examine the usefulness of uncertainty in global health and to rethink anthropological approaches to emergent medical technologies and pharmaceutical efficacy in biomedicine and complementary healing practices. Dr. Khan actively engages with scholars from philosophy, medical humanities, bioethics, religious studies, geography, politics, sociology, and history for his teaching and research.
Research Interests
Health inequity, alternative healing practices, psychological anthropology, medical humanities, religion, global health, security regimes, Pakistan, and Urban US.