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Languages, Linguistics and Film

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Professor Parvati Nair, B.A., M.A., Ph.D (University of London), Member of the Academia Europea, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Parvati

Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies

Email: p.nair@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8328
Room Number: ArtsOne 1.23
Website: www.parvatinair.com

Profile

I write as a migrant subject on questions of human mobility, forced or otherwise.

My research interests lie on the nexus of Cultural Studies and Migration Studies, with a special focus on visual representations of migration and displacement. My background is in Spanish Cultural Studies, starting with my doctoral work on the concept and practices of community in Spain. Subsequently, my writing has taken a more comparative and transnational focus, considering questions of human mobility and culture in contexts of globalization and transnational connections. My work is transdisciplinary and I employ methodologies that combine critical theory with ethnography. My preferred medium as an entry point to reflecting on the complexities and challenges of migration is photography as viewed against existing policies and practices that affect displaced and refugee populations. I have published extensively on photography as a mode of engaging with many socio-political issues relating to migration, such ethnicity, gender, urban spaces, borders, inequalities, environmental displacement, cultural memory and community. I have also published on film and music, especially flamenco. My work is committed to an ethics of social justice, dignity, and human and planetary rights through revisions in existing policies, discourses and practices.

I joined Queen Mary University of London in 2000, after some years of teaching in other universities. Since then, I have engaged in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in Modern Languages and Cultures, Film and Comparative Literature. I have also successfully supervised and co-supervised over a dozen doctoral dissertations.

In 2012, I took a secondment from Queen Mary, University of London to work as Founding Director of the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility in Barcelona, Spain. There, I led work that focused on migration and media, statelessness and transnational connections, international women migrants, cities and migration, and migration-related crises. Our aim was to direct research findings to inform policymaking on international migration. Between 2014 and 2018, I represented the United Nations University (UNU) at the Global Migration Group (GMG), a forum of twenty-two agencies of the United Nations working on migration. In 2017, I acted as Working Chair of the GMG and represented UNU at the United Nations General Assembly in New York as the United Nations system worked towards the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration adopted by 163 Member States in 2018. In 2019, I took on the role of Special Adviser on Migration at UNU, based at the United Nations campus in Bonn, Germany.

From Autumn 2019 to Summer 2022, I was Head of the School of Languages Linguistics, and Film. I am currently the Director for Graduate Studies.

 

Personal website: www.parvatinair.com

Other websites:

http://www.women.qmul.ac.uk/virtual/women/atoz/nair.htm

https://mobilityconvention.columbia.edu/parvati-nair

 

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