Zareena Grewal is an Associate Professor in American Studies, Religious Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.  Her first book is a historical ethnography of transnational Islamic intellectual networks in the US, titled “Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Crisis of Islam” (NYU 2013). Grewal’s current project funded by Luce examines the discourses around Islam and slavery/bonded labor in Pakistan as they connect to security discourses and religious and gender ideologies using the case of Syeda Ghulam Fatima and her Lahore-based NGO, Bonded Labour Liberation Front. Fatima’s story has garnered a great deal of attention in the US, especially once she was highlighted by the popular photoblog Humans of Pakistan, a derivative of Humans of New York as “Pakistan’s Harriet Tubman,” a local, female reformer and national heroine fighting for human rights and against modern slavery in the form of bonded labour in the brick kilns in Punjab. Despite being celebrated in the US, even receiving the Clinton Foundations Global Citizen Award, she is under a great deal of scrutiny from the Pakistani government and from local landowners invested in maintaining the status quo. In this regard, her visibility to publics outside of Pakistan provide her protection from hostile parties within Pakistan in order to pursue this controversial advocacy work on behalf of brick kiln workers. One of the ways landowners attack Fatima is by challenging the Islamic grounds of her work. Grewal research explores how state intervention and state surveillance relies on the cooperation of local religious patriarchs who are critical of human rights workers advocating for brick kiln workers and how NGOs and human rights activists respond and, importantly, how these political negotiations play out on a global media stage.