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School of Business and Management

Borderlines: An Interdisciplinary Research Collective

 

Overview

Borderlines is an Interdisciplinary Research Collective committed to social justice, radical, experimental and innovative methodologies and interdisciplinary pedagogies and conceptual paradigms. The group aims to bring together diverse scholars resisting strict definition of fields and disciplines but thriving through differences and alternative vantage points. Committed to decolonizing of praxis and the problematisation of the normative through critical enquiry, it seeks to thwart the margins, peripheries, boundaries and notions of alterity.

Borderlines: an Interdisciplinary Research Collective in Creative and Cultural Economies

School of Business and Management
Queen Mary University of London
London, E1 4NS

Email: Y.ibrahim@qmul.ac.uk 

Convenors

Yasmin Ibrahim

Professor Yasmin Ibrahim’s research explores the human and social dimensions of digital platforms. She has written extensively on digital economy and culture. Her work on digital technologies advances critical pedagogies for understanding new media technologies in terms of socio-cultural and ethical implications. Another strand of her research explores notions of ‘Othering’ through dominant themes of inequalities, migration, human displacement, border controls, Islam and terrorism. She is Visiting Professor at the MYRA School of Business at Mysore. She is the lead for Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) in SBM. Her book publications include Calais and its Border Politics: From Control to Demolition with Routledge, Production of the 'Self' in the Digital Age with Palgrave Macmillan and The Politics of Gaze; The Image Economy Online, Forthcoming with Routledge. For more details on her research and publications, https://qmul.academia.edu/yasminibrahim.

Sadhvi Dar

Sadhvi has an established presence in the postcolonial and decolonizing studies scholarly communities within the management and organization discipline. She was awarded her PhD in 2006 from the University of Cambridge. Her research draws on ethnographic and psychosocial methodologies and includes critical analyses of the international development sector, NGO management, and the intersection of race and gender in higher education. Sadhvi is dedicated to anti-racist work and embraces a decolonizing politics. She has been co-organizing anti-racist and decolonizing events and workshops at international conferences since 2005. She is also a co-founding member of the online communities: VIDA and the Decolonizing Alliance. She is Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy and is a member of Senate at Queen Mary. Her current projects engage in community-building and collaboration among scholars of colour and university workers. Building the Anti Racist Classroom, BreakThrough!, The Decolonizing Alliance. Sadhvi also works in collaboration with Queen Mary's Drama department on a multi-stakeholder research project called The Verbatim Formula. Since 2018, Sadhvi has been involved with consultancy projects tackling anti-racist pedagogy and decolonizing initiatives with a number of UK HEIs including Kent Law School, University of Roehampton, Middlesex University, Leeds-Beckett University, Loughborough University, University of Bath, and Queen Mary University of London. Sadhvi is also involved in a number of pro-bono consultancy roles with third sector organizations. These roles include sitting on the Evaluation Working Group for a mental health charity called the Dragon Café in London (2015-present), artistic director and research lead for a network of art practitioners and third sector managers called The Evaluation Project (2014-2018).

Amit Rai

Amit Rai is a postcolonial scholar and the Programme Director for MA in Creative Industries and Arts Organization. He has taught at Florida State University, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Rule of sympathy: Race, sentiment, and power, 1760-1860 (Palgrave), and Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s new media assemblage (Duke). His articles have appeared in Cultural Studies, Social Text, Discourse, Third Text, Screen, Diaspora, South Asian Popular Culture, Camera Obscura, and the Women’s Studies Journal. His latest book is, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India with Duke University Press. In collaboration with Live Art Development Agency Rai is working on RRR5 (2019-21) which considers the idea of what forms of management and methodologies of production might be more appropriate and effective for radical new forms of artistic practice. For many black, women, queer, disabled, trans, working class and other socially marginalised artists Live Art offers a site to break apart traditions of representation and explore the construction and performance of identity. Amit sits on the Board of Trustees of the Live Art Development Agency and Project Phakama. Through AHRC funded grant for emergency Covid 19 funding, and through ongoing research into long-term sustainable strategies for diversity affirmative and anti-racist organisational practice in the performing arts, Amit’s research explores collaborative governance and multi-stakeholder policy making in the creative economy and cultural education through cultural policy innovations.

Tana Licsandru

Dr Tana Licsandru is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Marketing in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London. Tana's main research interests lie in the broad area of transformative consumer research, with particular focus on consumer diversity, inclusion and wellbeing in multicultural marketplaces. Her current projects delve into the ways in which historical and social hierarchies, power, privilege, and individual actions impact the consumption experiences and daily lives of marginalized and discriminated groups, with focus on immigrants and ethnic minorities. Her research has appeared in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, International Marketing Review, among others.

Isadora Cruxên

Dr Isadora Cruxên is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Business and Society at Queen Mary University of London. She studies the political economy of development with an interest in three core issues: (1) the politics of market-making and institutional change in global South contexts; (2) financialization and the politics of finance; (3) forms of social mobilization and participatory methods of research and planning. Her work explores these issues in the realms of urban infrastructures, impact investing, water governance, and gender politics. She is also a research affiliate with the Data + Feminism Lab at MIT and co-leads the collaborative research project Data Against Feminicide.

Maya Parmar

In January 2023, Parmar joined the project ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the present’ at Queen Mary University of London, English department. The project is Arts Humanities Research Council funded, led by the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London, in partnership with the British Library.

Parmar has an interest in minoritized identities, and in particular cultural narratives and representations of belonging amongst the South Asian diaspora. After completing her funded doctorate (2013) on what she calls the ‘double diaspora’ – that community that have migrated from India to East Africa to Britain – she took up a research role at The Open University (2013 - 2021). Alongside her research, Parmar leads Hadithi, which is dual stranded: it has a consultancy arm and the social enterprise division called Hadithi C.I.C. Hadithi C.I.C works in the heritage sector, with community groups, schools and cultural organisations, offering ways of remembering, learning and connecting.

Zafeirenia Brokalaki

Dr Zafeirenia Brokalaki is Lecturer in Marketing and Communication at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London.

Zafeirenia’s research interests broadly concentrate on the aesthetics, politics and ethics of markets and consumption with a particular interest in the cultural and creative industries. Zafeirenia also works on topics that concern the historical constitution of the creative market, creative epistemologies and the marketisation of the body.

Zafeirenia

Leslie James

Leslie James is Senior Lecturer in Global History at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2015) and has articles in Callaloo, American Historical Review, Comparatives Studies in Society and History, and the Journal of Social History. Her next book will be out with Harvard University Press in 2025, The Moving Word: How West African and Caribbean Newspapers built the Black Radical Tradition.

We encourage, but are in no way limited to, asking questions about:

  • The political economy of the cultural and creative sectors
  • The digital, online, virtual worlds and associated emergent subjectivities and identities
  • Aesthetics and knowledges
  • The postcolonial, neo-colonial, de-colonial - Feminisms, queering
  • Histories, archiving, temporality, the un/timely
  • Fictions, fantasy, dreams, post-truth
  • Sustainability, consumption, ecologies
  • Privilege, power, in arts practice
  • Digital Archives
  • Mobile platforms and corporeal technologies

We support using the full, and growing, spectrum of disseminating work by:

  • Enquiring into the contexts of power and value in the creative industries and cultural sector
  • Writing together
  • Reading together, re-reading work
  • Making art, performance, fictions and rhymes
  • Making interventions / hacking technologies
  • Blogs, zines, podcasts, pamphlets, posters

This Research Group is linked to, but not limited by, the expected Masters in Creative Industries and Arts Leadership.

 

Selected member publications

Books

Journals

  • Rai, A. (2015) “The affect of Jugaad: Frugal innovation and postcolonial practice in India’s mobile phone ecology” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
  • Dar, S., Liu, H., Dy, A., and Brewis, D.N. (2020) The Business School is Racist: Act up!, Organization, OnlineFirst: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420928521. Organization’s 4th most read article; Ranked 1st for 3-month Altmetrics: 132.
  • Dar, S and Ibrahim, I. (2019) The Blackened Body and White Governmentality: Managing the UK academy and the production of shame, Gender, Work, and Organization, 26(9): 1241-1254. GWO’s top 10% most downloaded paper Jan 2018-Dec 2019.
  • Inchley, M., Dar, S., Pujara, S, and Baker, S. (2019). The Verbatim Formula: Caring for care leavers in the neoliberal university, Research in Drama Education, 24(3): 413-419.
  • Dar, S. (2018). The Masque of Blackness: Or, performing assimilation in the white academe. Organization, 26(3): 432-446.
  • Dar, S. (2018). De-Colonizing the Boundary-Object. Organization Studies, 39(4): 565-584.
  • Dar, S. (2014) Hybrid Accountabilities: When Western and Non-Western Accountabilities Collide, Human Relations, 67(2): 131-151.
  • Ibrahim, Y. (2020) The child refugee in Calais: from invisibility to the ‘suspect figure’. Int J Humanitarian Action 5, 19 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-020-00087-z
  • Ibrahim, Y. (2020) Between soap and science: The pandemic, experts and expendable lives,
  • Social Sciences & Humanities Open,Volume 2, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100080
  • Ibrahim, Y., & Howarth, A. The Munchetty Controversy: Empire, Race and the BBC, Gender, Work and Organization, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gwao.12543

Other publications

 

Events

Discussion of ‘Jugaad Time’ by Amit S Rai - 9th October, 2019 in the South Asia Forum Discussion Group, https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/southasia/2019/09/19/discussion-of-amit-s-rais-jugaad-time/

Dr Jenny K. Rodriguez, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester presented a Research Seminar on 4th November 2020, hosted by Dr Sadhvi Dar, Borderlines. The title of the talk was "From zero to hero: Narratives of professional identity in times of Covid-19". Also, my co-authors in this work are Gregorio Perez (University of Santiago de Chile) and Stephen Procter (Newcastle University)

In 2019, As part of the Festival of Communities, Borderlines organized the ‘Veiled Gaze’ exhibition primarily catering to the Tower Hamlet and East London Communities. The exhibition sought to track the relevance of the veil to all communities/religions in Tower Hamlets. Following from the 2018 UNPRME conference ‘Leaving No one Behind’ Hosted by SBM, in 2019 the school also hosted a South East London Regional meeting to discuss communal and environmental initiatives to specifically cater to the region.

Maria Adamson

Maria Adamson's main research interests lie in the area of gender inequalities in professional work, including the focus on socio-cultural basis of gender workplace inequality, social and organisational dynamics of (in)equalities at work, feminist theorising in management and organisation studies and her recent research on the role of business celebrities and the impact of popular culture on work and organisations. Maria's projects have critically explored the quality of inclusion in professions and organisations, applying a postfeminist lens to understand contemporary gendered inequalities in the workplace. Her current project focuses exploring the elite female executives as gendered role models, specifically it seeks to understand the relationship between cultural discourses of femininity produced by celebrity executives and the impact they have on aspiring businesswomen and the construction of gendered workplace meanings.

Mojisola Adebayo

Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance in the School of English and Drama.London born theatre artist - performer, playwright, director, producer, facilitator, teacher and researcher.

Rehana Ahmed

Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial and World Literature and Culture; British Muslim, British Asian and South Asian literature and culture; multiculturalism; literary controversies.

Maher Anjum

Organisational Consultant, Senior Researcher and Programme Manager, with 15 years’ experience of developing evidenced based projects and building high profile public-private partnerships to achieve social progress, minimize environmental footprint and develop sustainable opportunities for those with limited access to resources and opportunities including young people  and vulnerable people.  Diverse skills in accelerating initiatives through, high level research, focus group with stakeholders building cross-cultural relationships, facilitating workshops and training, and delivering high-value global programs. 

Suyash Barve

In my PhD, I am exploring the historic and contemporary interconnections between the creation, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities and the production of political discourse with a focus on media ecologies of India specifically the business strategies of merchant capitalists and organization of labour. Through this project, I hope to contribute to the expanding literature in varied areas of research interest such as economic history of South Asia, labour movements of the twentieth century, affective politics of urbanization, political economy of media and information communication infrastructure amongst others.

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

Senior Lecturer, specialising in World Cinemas, particularly new independent Indian Cinema, emerging cinemas from South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

Marcia Vera Espinoza

Lecturer in Human Geography
Migration and Development in the Global South

Rachael Gilmour

Reader Colonial and postcolonial literature and theory; African literary and cultural studies; Colonialism, postcolonialism, and linguistic thought; Black British and British Asian writing; Language politics and literary translingualism

Jessica Jacobs

Research Fellow, with research interests in filmmaking, creative mapping and other community focused strategies that aim to engage a wider audience within the scope of academic research and knowledge production.

Charlotta Salmi

Lecturer Postcolonial Literature and Theory; Graphic Narratives; Literary Form; Conflict and protest literature; Borders and the state.

Nisha Ramayya

Lecturer Contemporary and Experimental Poetry and Poetics; Critical Race Theory and Black Study; Feminist and Queer Theory; Visual, Sound, and Video Poetry, and Performance.

Bill Schwarz

Professor Caribbean writing; Postcolonial; twentieth-century British history

Philippa Williams

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography,
Senior Tutor Geography Building, Room 215 +44 (0)20 7882 6977 p.williams@qmul.ac.uk Citizenship, development and identity in India; India’s new economy; geographies of peace; material politics of transnational identities

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