Ali Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan. His research interests vary from labor issues, particularly child and bonded labor to popular culture in Pakistan focusing particularly on cinema and sports. He has previously worked in Washington and in Islamabad for the World Bank's South Asia Region and with the International Labor Organization primarily on projects related to child and bonded labor.

Ali Khan's book Representing Children: Power, Policy and the Discourse on Child Labour in the Football Manufacturing Industry of Pakistan was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. He is also the General Editor for a series of books on Sociology and Anthropology in Pakistan. Five of these volumes have been published. Ali Khan's latest co-authored book, Cricket Cauldron (I.B.Tauris), was published in 2013 and is a sociological analysis of culture and society as seen through the prism of cricket in Pakistan. He is currently undertaking research on the Pakistani Film industry with a new book due out later in 2013.

Ali Khan has an MPhil and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in England.