Dr Muhammad Kavesh

Muhammad Kavesh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the South Asia Research Institute (SARI) at the College of Asia and the Pacific. He also serves as editor of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asia Book Series.

Kavesh is the author of two books: Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan (University of Washington Press, 2026) and Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan (2021). He is also the lead editor of two manuscripts: Multispecies Mixtures and the Animals In-Between (forthcoming, Michigan State University Press) and Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World (2024). In addition, he has co-edited two special journal issues: “Anthropology of Mutualism” (2023, Anthropology Today) and “Sense Making in a More-than-Human World” (2021, The Australian Journal of Anthropology).

Kavesh’s work, published in leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, is informed by his long-standing engagement with continental and South Asian philosophy, decolonial thought, geopolitics, environmental humanities, sensory studies, and posthumanism. His articles, “Face-to-face with the (animal) Other” (2023, American Ethnologist) and “Welcoming the Foreigner: Notes on the Possibility of Multispecies Hospitality” (2024, American Anthropologist), draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of infinity to ask how conceiving the Other beyond political, religious, or even human categories might open possibilities for decolonization. Another article, “Contested Flights” (2024, Journal of Asian Studies), engages with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “the Intruder” to explore what it means to welcome a more-than-human Other, or intruder, into the home. Across his broader work, Kavesh brings into dialogue the thought of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Donna Haraway with South/Central Asian intellectual and literary traditions, including Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, Farid-ud-Din Attar, Ibn al-Arabi, Waris Shah (Heer-Ranjha), and Nayer Masud.

Since mid-2023, Kavesh has been engaging with a multi-year Australian Research Council project examining animal trade and the use of animals in traditional medicine (see his article, “Donkey Trade: Challenges to Sustaining Mutualism in Rural Pakistan,” 2023 Anthropology Today).

Since 2024, in his role as Director of SARI, Kavesh has organised four international conferences, two art exhibitions, six workshops, four film screenings, and more than twenty additional events. His teaching focuses on South Asia, sustainability, environmental governance, and geopolitics.