Yasmeen Arif has joined SNU as a professor in sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Prior to this, she has taught sociology for more than a decade at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her book Life, Emergent: The Social in the Afterlives of Violence (2016, University of Minnesota Press explores a politics of life across multiple global conditions of mass violence. A co-edited volume Critical Themes in Indian Sociology (2018, Sage Publications) is a collection of over 30 essays. A second forthcoming edited volume is called Event and Everyday: Empiricisms and Epistemologies, and is based on a decade long graduate research methods and theory seminar, where the idea of event as method is explored over various themes. She has published in several international journals and volumes. Her current writing is about a bio-political critique of the government of identity.

Other research areas include urban studies, international law and humanitarianisms, science and technology studies, money, visual and material cultures, theory, philosophy and epistemology in social anthropology/sociology.

She has held positions at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities); The Graduate Institute, Geneva; CSDS, Delhi and the American University of Beirut; Lebanon. The Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, among others, have supported her work.

She has served on the editorial team of Contributions to Indian Sociology (2012-16), and is currently on the editorial board of The American Anthropologist. She has published her work in several international journals and other volumes.