Faiza Rais has a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Missouri and is presently working towards a Ph.D. in Sociology. Her research interests are in the fields of culture and identity and social inequalities with an emphasis on gender. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of everyday lived realities at a women’s shelter home for domestic abuse survivors in Pakistan. In particular, she explores how lived realities are imagined and enacted in the shelter at the intersections of disciplinary practices and politics of gender empowerment and puts into broad relief how shelter residents conceptualize their identities within and through such intersections.