Dr Uma Pradhan
Uma Pradhan is a Research Associate at the South Asian Studies Programme, University of Oxford and Lecturer at University College London (UCL). At OSGA, she convenes the Options paper 'Education, State and Society in South Asia' and the Education.SouthAsia Initiative.
She is currently working on a research project that explores the themes of Artificial Intelligence, Technology and Indigenous Language Education. This research builds on her DPhil project (University of Oxford) on the cultural politics of minority language use in schools. She was awarded Dor Bahadur Bista prize 2015 and Nations and Nationalism prize 2018 for the articles based on this research. This research is published as a monograph titled Language, Education, and the Nepali Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Reviews of this book are published in EBHR, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Contemporary South Asia. She has recently co-edited two books - Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Nepal: Educational Transformations and New Avenues of Learning (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Rethinking Education in the Context of Post-Pandemic South Asia: Challenges and Possibilities (Routledge, 2023).
She is a Co-Editor of Compare: Journal of Comparative and International Education, Associate Editor at Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS), an executive committee member of the Britain Nepal Academic Council, and the co-host of the podcast series 'Nepal Conversations'.
Uma was Departmental Lecturer (2021-22) and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2018- 2021) at South Asian Studies Programme, as well as Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. She has received several research grants, including UCL research culture award (2022), ESRC Impact Acceleration Award (2021), GCRF funded 'Visions of Education' (2019-2020), and Public Engagement with Research Seed funded 'For the better future' (2019-2021).
Prior to joining OSGA, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Education Anthropology, Aarhus University, Copenhagen. Her research at Aarhus focused on understanding the ways in which public funding for the education of marginalised groups shape the relationship between state and citizens. Based on this research, she guest-edited (with Karen Valentin) a collection of articles published as a special issue in South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies.
Before joining academia, Uma worked in the development sector for several years.
More details:
