Sanniah Jabeen’s research examines how digital printing, machine replication, and mass production impact modern and contemporary South Asian arts. She has collaborated with UNESCO on craft conservation, heritage preservation, and public arts engagement projects. Additionally, Sanniah completed curatorial fellowships at the Royal Ontario Museum, Islamic Art and Material Culture Collaborative (IAMCC), The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and the Lahore Biennale Foundation. Her doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada. Her fellowship research project is titled Handmade in the Age of Mass (Re)Production: The Many Lives of Ajrak. Sanniah is a 2025-26 JHI Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow.
What are your main research interests?
My research sits at the intersection of South Asian art history, textile and craft histories, and the politics of reproduction—especially how “handmade” is redefined in an era of mass production and digital replication. I use Ajrak and related textile forms to track how cloth moves between workshops and markets, fashion and politics, and everyday wear and museum display. What excites me is that textiles demand both close looking and ethical looking: you can’t study pattern without also asking about labor, value, and the conditions that make beauty possible.
I’m also drawn to this particular moment where fast fashion defines most of our clothing choices but is having visible repercussions on climate, health and labor regulations. In response more people are turning toward slow fashion and handcrafted work. But these worlds are deeply entangled—handmade often gains value through its contrast with mass production, while “traditional” motifs are frequently extracted and reinserted into industrial design. That tension—between care and capture, heritage, and replication—is where my questions take shape.
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
At the JHI, I’m working on my dissertation project on the contemporary lives of “handmade” textiles—particularly how Ajrak, a block-printed and resist-dyed cloth produced in India and Pakistan, moves through workshops, markets, museums, and, increasingly, the fast-fashion pipeline. I often say that I didn’t choose Ajrak; Ajrak chose me.
I grew up in Pakistan with Ajrak as a familiar and enduring presence—worn, gifted, and encountered across everyday and ceremonial contexts—so it has never felt like a distant “art object.” During graduate school, the Royal Ontario Museum’s Cloth that Changed the World exhibition sharpened that familiarity into a research problem: what changes when a textile you have lived with is reframed within museum display and art-historical categories, and why does Ajrak still feel comparatively under-theorized or misrepresented within existing scholarship?
At the same time, I began noticing Ajrak motifs—and other textiles I recognize closely, such as aari embroidery and phulkari—reappearing as surface pattern across retail spaces across the globe. Seeing these forms translated into mass-produced print made the stakes of the project impossible to ignore. My work therefore traces how “traditional” textiles circulate across contexts and economies, asking what is carried forward in these translations, what is flattened or erased, and how new regimes of value and visibility emerge when craft becomes reproducible at industrial scale.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
The JHI has been one of the most supportive experiences of my life. I’m deeply grateful for the weekly Thursday lunches—their steadiness matters more than I can easily explain. They’ve given me a rhythm, a community, and the rare opportunity to think out loud with people who are generous readers across fields. The feedback I’ve received from other Fellows has helped me clarify what I’m actually trying to argue, especially in the thick of dissertation-writing when your brain can feel like it’s full of fragments.
On a personal note: as a new mother, I’ve been finding my bearings again—learning how to return to writing and research with a completely restructured day, body, and sense of time. The JHI has been the best place for me to navigate this new life and its responsibilities, because the support has felt real and ongoing, not performative. It’s given me space to be both a scholar and a person. In an ideal world—the entire PhD experience would be like this!
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
The humanities teach us how to stay with complexity—how to read what’s been normalized, how to notice whose labor is made invisible, and how history lives inside objects, images, and everyday practices. Right now, that work feels especially urgent. Across North America, humanities programs and public-facing humanities infrastructures are under real financial and political pressure—from university restructuring and layoffs to major disruptions in humanities funding streams. In an age of accelerated misinformation, the humanities train us in critical reading and writing: how to evaluate evidence, track power, and ask what gets remembered and what gets erased. And they also insist—quietly but stubbornly—on the possibility of beauty and profound thought even in the midst of violence, grief, and dehumanization. For me, this matters acutely in textile and craft studies, where it’s easy to romanticize “tradition.” Humanistic work helps us refuse that romance when it obscures exploitation, while still holding onto what’s meaningful: care, skill, inheritance, faith, and lived worlds.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I’ve been watching the STARZ show Outlander for years, and as it moves into its final season, I’ve found myself paying close attention to its material world—especially the moments when Ajrak appears on screen, in costume details and as household textiles on set. Because the series is a period drama that moves between the eighteenth century and the early twentieth, these glimpses raise questions for me about how “global” textiles are sourced, styled, and made legible within historical storytelling: are these appearances researched references, aesthetic coincidence, or part of a broader habit of using South Asian textiles as evocative texture without naming their histories? Either way, they remind me how much changes when you know what you’re looking at—the pleasure of recognition, but also the critical awareness of how objects travel, get recontextualized, and are often detached from the labor and worlds that produced them.
What's a fun fact about you?
I am a bit of a coffee snob and I’m obsessed with finding Toronto’s best coffee shops to work in—good espresso, good light, and a place where I can quietly keep “reading” the textiles people wear around me.