Dr. Khursheed Wadia, an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. was the winner of the prestigious W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize for her book Muslim Women and Power: Political and Civic Engagement in West European Socities.
The Mackenzie Prize is awarded annually to the best book published in political science.
This book provides an account of Muslim women’s political and civic engagement in Britain and France. It examines their interaction with civil society and state institutions to provide an understanding of their development as political actors.
The authors argue that Muslim women’s participation is expressed at the intersections of the groups and society to which they belong. In Britain and France, their political attitudes and behaviour are influenced by their national/ethnic origins, religion and specific features of British and French societies. Thus three main spheres of action are identified: the ethnic group, religious group and majority society. Unequal, gendered power relations characterise the interconnection(s) between these spheres of action.
Muslim women are positioned within these complex relations and find obstacles and/or facilitators governing their capacity to act politically. The authors suggest that Muslim women’s interest in politics, knowledge of it and participation in both institutional and informal politics is higher than expected. This book will appeal to students and scholars of politics, sociology, gender studies and social anthropology, and will also be of use to policy makers and practitioners in the field of gender and ethno-religious/ethno-cultural policy.
About Dr. Khursheed Wadia
Research interests
Khursheed’s research interests and specialisms lie at the intersection of politics, gender and ethnicity in Europe with a focus on Britain and France. Her research covers two inter-related areas of study: gender, ethnicity and politics (political participation and policy) in Britain and France; migration and ethnic relations in Britain and France. She has extended her work on political participation and policy to examine why and how young people engage with political and civic institutions and processes and how this engagement is shaped by the past and inter-generational relationships. This research was undertaken as part of a large-scale, comparative European study (see below).
She is author (with Gill Allwood, Nottingham Trent University) of Women and Politics in France: 1958-2000 (Routledge, 2000), Gender and Policy in France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Refugee Women in Britain and France (Manchester University Press, 2010) and of various short works. Khursheed is also co-author with Danièle Joly (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) of Muslim Women and Power: Political and Civic Engagement in West European Societies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) which has been translated into French and published by the Presses de L’Université Laval.
She has also been the Warwick (CRER) coordinator and Co-Investigator of various EU Commission-funded projects: i) Refugee Women: Reception, Integration and Voluntary Return Regimes in Europe – RefWom (author of country studies on UK, Ireland and Greece); ii) Minority Formation and Cultural Diversity in European Nation-states – MinFor (author of UK study); iii) Traumatised Refugees in Europe – TraRef (author of country studies on the UK and France respectively); iv) Integration Indicators and Generational Change – IntGen (author with Catherine Anders of country study on the UK). Furthermore, she co-investigated a study funded by UK Government Office-East on ‘The Crime and Community Safety Needs of Asylum Seekers and the Communities Resident in Peterborough’.
Current and recent research projects
Khursheed is currently PI on a project funded by the British Academy: Forced Marriage Policy in France: A Study of Inclusivity and Gender Transformation (September 2017 – August 2019).
Recent research projects have included a four-year study, funded under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), on how young people’s social and political participation is shaped by the shadows of totalitarianism and populism in Europe. The MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy And Civic Engagement) project was coordinated by Prof. Hilary Pilkington, University of Manchester and undertaken in collaboration with 14 other higher education insitutions in Europe. It ran from April 2011 to November 2015.
Khursheed was also PI (with Gabriella Lazaridis, University of Leicester) on an ESRC-funded seminar series titled ‘Whose Security? Migration-(In)Security Dilemmas 10 Years after 9/11’ and Co-I (with Danièle Joly) on a 4-year study funded by the ESRC on ‘Women from Muslim Communities and Politics in Britain and France’.
