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Emeritus Professor Alison Shaw

Alison Shaw

Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology

Alison Shaw's research interests are in the anthropology of medical genetics and genetic screening; consanguineous marriage; Pakistan/South Asia; migration, health and transnational cultural movements.

Contact Information

Email: alison.shaw@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Brief biography

Alison Shaw's first fieldwork in Pakistan and the UK in the early 1980s resulted in a pioneering study of British Pakistani practices of transnational kinship and marriage.   She updated her original monograph with fieldwork conducted in the 1990s, published as Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani families in Britain (2000).  She then conducted fieldwork with British Pakistani families with children with genetic problems: Negotiating Risk: British Pakistani experiences of genetics  (2009) examines discrepancies between patients' and clinicians' understandings of genetic risk and inheritance in the context of referrals to medical genetics. She has also taught Urdu professionally and trained teachers of Urdu in adult education. Recently, she has worked on a comparative examination of the social, political and health impact of discourses of genetic risk in consanguineous marriage in Europe, South Asia and the Middle East: Cousin Marriages: between tradition, genetic risk, and cultural change (2015)

Brief CV

Academic Qualifications

B.A. Human Sciences, University of Oxford 1979
D. Phil, Social Anthropology, University of Oxford 1984

Appointments

2016    Adjunct Professor, UCLA
2014    Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford. Retired 2026.
2009    Senior Associate Fellow, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
2004    Senior Research Fellow, NDPH, University of Oxford.
1997    Lecturer, Dept. of Human Sciences, Brunel University.
1997    Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University.
1993    Tutor in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford.
1991    Lecturer, Contemporary Issues in Anthropology, Goldsmith's College, University of London.
1984    Director, Asian Language Development Project, Oxfordshire Council for Community Relations (until 1988).

 

Aneel Brar

DPhil Student

Yasmynn Chowdhury

DPhil Student