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. Uma received her DPhil in International Development from University of Oxford, where she studied 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 is also a co-editor of the 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).
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 was also the Principal Investigator for ESRC Impact Acceleration Award (2021), GCRF funded project 'Visions of Education' (2019-2020), and Public Engagement with Research Seed funded project 'For the better future' (2019-2021). She is also an executive committee member of the Britain Nepal Academic Council, Associate Editor at Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS), and the co-host of the podcast series 'Nepal Conversations'.
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.
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