Zahid Ali is a socio-cultural anthropologist at Rice University. His research focuses on how countries like Pakistan in the Global South mobilize geology and natural resources to pursue a nationalist and developmental agenda. He examines how these nations manage resource extraction amidst global economic pressures. In the context of accelerating climate change, Zahid studies how Indigenous communities confront land dispossession and resource accumulation. His broader interests include climate change, energy poverty, resource development, and disaster capitalism, aiming to highlight the socio-political forces shaping resource access and the resistance of marginalized communities.

Zahid's research questions lie at the intersection of the violent clash between fossil fuel modernity and desert life in Thar, Pakistan. Through ethnographic exploration, he aims to understand how mega development projects related to coal-powered energy infrastructures shape and reshape everyday life in the Thar desert. Zahid focuses on studying how the desert space is produced as a global resource for exploitation while entrenching state power and development regimes. Broadly, he is interested in tracing the genealogies of carbon energy infrastructures and how these infrastructures shape, reshape, and destroy transnational geographies and ecologies.