About
Dr Bindi Shah is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
"I am interested in supervising PhD students in areas related to migration (transnational relations, citizenship and belonging), race based exclusions and hate on the Web/social media, environmental and climate sustainability/justice for marginalised communities."
Bindi's research focuses on migration, religion, nationhood, citizenship, belonging with respect to British Asians and Asian Americans, the Jain diaspora, and wider migration and refugee flows to the UK, as well as on the role of social capital to foster environmental and climate sustainability and justice amongst marginalised groups. She adopts Critical Race, Feminist and Postcolonial approaches, and has expertise in qualitative and digital methodologies.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- A key question that Bindi is interested in asking is: What shapes citizenship and a sense of belonging to the nation amongst immigrants and established ethnic minority communities?
- Bindi is also interested in exploring the role of social capital for developing interdisciplinary solutions to climate crisis and biodiversity loss for marginalised communities.
Current research
Bindi leads The Ramniklala Solanki Pioneers Project, a project of the University of Southampton's India Centre for Includive Growth and Sustainable Development. This project seeks to create a digital archive documenting the lives of South Asians who have made a significant contribution to the making of modern Britain.
Bindi is Co-I on Make yourself at home (MY-HOME): Co-curating the South Asian community experience at Southampton. To mark the BBC's centenary anniversary, this AHRC-funded public engagement inter-generational project aims to understand British South Asians engagement with and perceptions of BBC South Asian programming from the 1960s onwards, and how such programming may have shaped their identities and sense of belonging to the British nation.
Under the rubric of 'Everyday Nationhood on the Web', Bindi has developed an innovative research design involving social science and computer science methodologoes to examine conversations on migration/immigration and race on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.
Bindi also leads the 'Food, Gender, Enterprise: Leveraging Interdisciplinarity for Sustainable Small-sclae Fisheries' funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering Frontiers Seed Funding Programme. This highly innovative project combines social science and engineering methodologies to investigate the impacts of biodiversity loss, climate change and COVID-19 on small-scale fisheries in Kerala, India, and explores potential technological, social and policy solutions.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Teaching
Bindi's teaching interests relate to the following areas:
Migration
Race & Ethnicity
Intersectional Inequalities
Sociology of Religion
Social Theory
Qualitative Research Methods
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Prior to her appointment at Southampton in 2011, Bindi held an ESRC Research Fellowship (2008-2010) in the Department of Social Sciences, Roehampton University. Between 2004-2007 she was a Research Fellow on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project 'British Pakistanis: Exploring Differential Outcomes in relation to Gender and Social Capital', in the Department of Geography, Univeristy College London. She has also held a lectureship in Sociology in the School of Social Policy and Social Research, University of Kent, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Insittute, National University of Singapore.
Prizes
- Association for Asian American Studies Prize for Outstanding Book published in 2012 for Social Sciences (2014)
- American Sociological Association Asia & Asian America Section Honourable Mention forLaotian Daughters: Working toward Community, Belonging and Environmental Justice (2012) (2013)