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 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'.
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). Her research focuses on power-laden dimensions of 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. Her research is published as a monograph titled Language, Education, and the Nepali Nation (Cambridge University Press). Reviews of this book are published in EBHR, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Contemporary South Asia.
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.
Monograph
Pradhan, U. 2020. Language, Education, and the Nepali Nation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edited collection
Valentin, K., & Pradhan, U. (Eds.). (2023). Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Nepal: Educational Transformations and New Avenues of Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pradhan, U., Valentin, K., & Gupta, M. (Eds) (2023). Rethinking Education in the Context of Post-Pandemic South Asia Challenges and Possibilities. Routledge.
Pradhan, U. and Valentin, K. (Guest Editors). 2019. ‘Towards a relational approach to State: understanding social and political transformation in Nepal’, special issue in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol 42, no. 5.
Journal articles
Pradhan, U. 2022. Discomfort as a method: Language, Education, and Politics of Knowledge Production. Studies in Nepali History and Society 27(1): 113–130.
Pradhan, U. and Valentin, K. 2020. 'Free education? Blurred public-private boundaries in state-run schooling in Nepal', Studies in Nepali History and Society 25(2): 277–298. (Translated 2021 in Nepali language: उमा प्रधान र कारेन भ्यालेन्टिन. निःश ुल्क शिक्षा ? राज्य-सञ्चालित विद्यालयमा पातलिएका सार्वजनिक-निजी सीमा, समाज अध्ययन १६: ४१–६३, २०७८ and Republished 2021 in (Eds) Ramesh Parajuli, Devendra Upreti, and Pratyoush Onta. School Education in Nepal. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari).
Pradhan, U. 2020. Interrogating quality: language, education, and imageries of competence in Nepal. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2018.1559036
Pradhan, U. and Valentin, K. 2019. Introduction: Towards a relational approach to State: understanding social and political transformation in Nepal’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol 42, no. 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1642615
Pradhan, U. 2019. Multi-ethnic citizens in a multi-ethnic state: Constructing state-citizen relations through ‘difference’ in Adivasi Janajati scholarship programmes in Nepal, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol 42, no. 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1645084
Pradhan, U., Shrestha, S. and Valentin, K. 2019. Disjunctured reciprocity: Paradoxes of community-school relationship in Nepal, Globalisation, Societies, and Education, 17:5, 561-573. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2019.1584032
Pradhan, U. 2018. Simultaneous identities: ethnicity and nationalism in mother tongue education in Nepal. Nations and Nationalism 25 (2): 718-738. (Nations and Nationalism Essay Prize 2018) DOI: doi.org/10.1111/nana.12463
Pradhan, U. 2017. Constructing knowledge, contesting legitimacy: knowledge-making in mother-tongue education schools in Nepal’, Ethnography and Education 12(3): 381-394. DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2017.1291358
Pradhan, U. 2016. New languages of schooling: dynamics of ethnicity and education in Nepal, HIMALAYA, The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 36(2): 9-21 (Dor Bahadur Bista Award 2015) https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol36/iss2/6/
Pradhan, U. 2007.The child-to-child approach to community and health development in South Asia. Children, Youth and Environments, 17(1): 257-268
Pradhan, U. and I. Roy. 2006. Pluralism and civil society partnerships: perspectives from Nepal and Uttar Pradesh’, Contemporary South Asia 15(1): 55-75. DOI: 10.1080/09584930600938065
Book chapters
Pradhan, U. 2023. (Re)constructing a 'good' school: Materials, affects, and meanings of education in post-earthquake Nepal. In (Eds.) Valentin, K. and U. Pradhan, Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Nepal: Educational Transformations and New Avenues of Learning, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pradhan, U. 2022. Global visions, national students: The narratives of ‘elsewhere’ in Nepal’s education policy. In (Eds.) Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Susan Thieme, and Andrea Kölbel, Mobilities and Mobilisations: South Asian Universities as Transformative Social Spaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pradhan, U., Deepak Thapa, Jeevan Baniya, Yangchen Gurung and Indrajit Roy. 2022. The politics of social protection in Nepal: State infrastructural power and implementation of the Scholarship Programme, in Thomas Lavers (Ed.) The Politics of Distributing Social Transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pradhan, U. and Valentin, K. 2019. 'Ethnography of education and anthropological knowledge production', In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Ed. George Noblit. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.468
Pradhan, U. 2019. 'From Language to Script: Constructing linguistic authority through language contact in schools in Nepal', In (Eds.) Mark Turin and Selma Sonntag, Politics of Language Contact in the Himalayas, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers (https://www.openbookpublishers.com//download/book/1073)
Pradhan, U. and Karki, S. 2019. 'Sustainable Development Goals in Nepal: Prospects and Challenges', In (Eds.) Nitya Khemka and Suraj Kumar, Social Development and the Sustainable Development Goals in South Asia, London: Routledge (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351035262)
Pradhan, U. 2018. 'National education system in Nepal: between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, In H. Letchamanan and D. Dhar (Ed.) Education in South Asia, London: Bloomsbury Publications (part of Education Around the World Series), pp 165-183 (https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/education-in-south-asia-and-the-indian-ocean-islands-9781350132856/)
Others
Pradhan, U. (2022). Book Review of In Search of Future: Youth, aspiration and mobility in Nepal, by Andrea Kölbel. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 58. doi:10.4000/ebhr.481
Pradhan, U. (2021). Book Review of Childs, Geoff & Choedup, Namgyal. From a trickle to a torrent: education, migration, and social change in a Himalayan valley of Nepal, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 27: 701-745. (https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13591)
2021 The Politics of Social Protection in Nepal, ESID Working Paper 167 (co-authored with Deepak Thapa, Jeevan Baniya, Yangchen Gurung, Sanjay Mahato and Indrajit Roy)
2020 Social Assistance for Education in Nepal, Martin Chautari Research Brief, Kathmandu: Martin Chautari.
2019 Co-temporality and aftermath epistemology in the wake of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes, Blog post for ‘After the Earth’s Violent Sway’: The tangible and intangible legacies of natural disaster. School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London.
2018 Local Institutions in Nepal: A literature review. The World Bank Washington DC: The World Bank (co-authored with Indrajit Roy).
- Education
- Anthropology
- Development Studies
- Nepal, anthropology of education, ethnicity & nationalism, minority language education, everyday state-making.
- Nepal, South Asia
Email: uma.pradhan@area.ox.ac.uk
College: Wolfson College
Office Details: 11 Bevington Road, Oxford, OX2 6LH