Anum Mustafa

Graduate Research Fellow

Anum Mustafa is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at MIT and a Graduate Research Fellow at MIT Gov/Lab. Her research interests are in public opinion, political behaviour and state-society relations, with an issue focus on environmental governance and climate change. Her dissertation looks at the attitudes of ordinary Americans on climate change, with a focus on Republicans and conservatives. It investigates how social identities like religion can be leveraged to reframe climate change as a meaningful moral problem for conservative communities, and the potential and limitations of this approach to move beyond polarised party politics on the issue. More broadly, she is interested in the causes of political polarisation in America (especially relating to environmental issues) and institutional configurations of state and civil society that reduce polarisation and build meaningfully diverse local publics.

Prior to joining MIT, Anum worked at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) in Lahore and as an economic consultant in Deloitte, London. Anum has a BSc in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan, and an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.