Dr Neelam Raina


Dr Neelam Raina
NameDr Neelam Raina
Job titleDirector of Research
Research institute
Primary appointmentResearch Knowledge Transfer Office
Email addressn.raina@mdx.ac.uk
ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5664-2411
Contact categoryAcademic staff

Biography

Biography

Dr. Neelam Raina is an Associate Professor of design and development at Middlesex University, London. Her research interests include conflict, security, peace building, material cultures, gender, and livelihood generation in fragile, conflict affected states. Raina’s work explores notions of healing, trauma, peace and reflection through the embodied practices of making, using material culture and tacit knowledge as the underpinning for approaching violence and peace building and for sustainable income generation. Raina is a post conflict reconstruction expert with a focus on South Asia where she has conducted extensive empirical research over the last two decades. The Women, Peace and Security agenda is key to Neelam’s and her research seeks to foreground voices of vulnerable and marginalised women. 

Dr Raina has led several large scale competitively funded research projects which examine material and social practices through which Muslim women in conflict areas reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed. Her work allows connections to be built between, creative home-based workers who are largely seen as peripheral, to development economics, and on the fringes of formal employment and contributors to GDP; to the larger notions of peace building, countering and preventing violent extremism, poverty spirals and conflict theory through culturally significant, socially relevant practices. She connects British creative industry into solution-based impactful approaches to global challenges through research.

Raina is a strong advocate for Afghan women and is the Director of the Secretariat to the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Afghan women and girls in UK parliament. Her research in Afghanistan is ongoing as she brings women’s tacit knowledge to commercially viable spaces from the confines of the home. Raina has submitted oral and written evidence to UK Select committees specially about Afghanistan where she continues to work.

Raina has a PhD in Design and Development, and a master’s in design and Manufacture from De Montfort University, Leicester. From 2018-2021 she was the Challenge Leader for UKRI’s conflict and security portfolio for the Global Challenges Research Fund. Raina has been a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. She is the editor for the International Journal of Traditional Arts, and her new work ‘Creative Economies of Culture in South Asia – Performers and Craftspeople’ comes out in 2023. Raina's latest essay - ‘Women’s Tacit, uncoded knowledge Ownership and Value in Conflict Zones’, appears Katy Deepwell's edited book, De-/anti-/post-colonial feminisms in contemporary art and Textile Crafts in September 2023. She also writes for British newspapers. 

 

Teaching

Academic - 

Doctoral Supervision.

Critical and Contextual Studies across Undergraduate Programes in the School of Design.

Community based -

Creative design and textile craft based design training modules

Field Research Training

Business skills for women led enterprise including social media marketing for craft made textiles.

Employment

UKRI-GCRF Challenge Leader for Protracted Conflict, Security, Refugees and Displacement
United Kingdom Research and Innovation
01 Apr 2018
31 Dec 2021

Education and qualifications

Grants

Projects

  • The Value of Culture in Conflict - Investigating the Sustainable Livelihood
Generation for Craftswomen in Azad Kashmir (Pakistan)
  • GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub

Prizes and Awards

Impact

  • A Design Sprint for the Creative Industries Sector Vision
  • Equality and the UK asylum process Fourth Report of Session 2022–23
  • Withdrawal from Afghanistan Fifth Report of Session 2022–23
  • All Party Parliamentary Group - Afghan Women and Girls

Evidence to public body

UK's Withdrawal from Afghanistan
UK Defence Select Committee
14 Dec 2021

Written and Oral evidence presented to UK Defence Select Committee

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/40021/html/

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/41507/pdf/
An inspection of the Home Office’s Afghan resettlement schemes
Independent Chief Inspector for Borders and Immigration
01 Feb 2023

Written Evidence Submitted

Equality and the UK asylum process
Women and Equalities Commission
20 Jun 2023

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/40580/documents/198406/default/

Defence Select Committee Report
House of Commons Defence Committee - Fifth Report
10 Feb 2023

Evidence presented to Defence Select Committee was used in this formal fifth report.

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/33946/documents/186082/default/

External activities

Doctoral Research Summer School - International Institute of Asian Studies
External committee
Co Convenor - Textile and dyes as sites of precarity and meaning
university of leiden

Textile and Dyes as Transnational, Global Knowledge

Our understanding of textile and dye crafts, both at the local and global levels, is invariably colored by colonial, national and post-war UN approaches to ‘development and rehabilitation’. More recently, the neo-liberal wave of institutionalizing art and culture through the frames of ‘heritage’ and/or ‘creative economy’ has begun to shape our ideas and sentiments about handmade textiles, clothing and dyes.

This ISGS invites applications from Arts, Design, Social Sciences and Humanities graduate students (doctoral, including doctorate practice-based research, and research master's) and early-career professionals (up to 3 years after the completion of the PhD). All applicants must be committed to or actively working on projects that engage with the ISGS theme.

In this LeidenGlobal-HAB-IIAS In Situ Graduate School (ISGS) we will aim to interrogate prevailing, dominant discourses through other, less visible, and marginalized vantage points.

https://www.iias.asia/masterclasses/textiledyes
18 Sept 2022
23 Sept 2023

Sounding Board Member
External committee
Sounding Board Member
The Creative and Cultural Exchange, London.
https://ncace.ac.uk/about/sounding-board-members/dr-neelam-raina/
01 Sept 2021
31 Oct 2023

GCRF Challenge lead
Reviewer for funding applications
United Kingdom Research and Innovation
Global Challenges Research Fund
https://www.newton-gcrf.org/gcrf/challenge-leaders/dr-neelam-raina/
10 Mar 2018
31 Dec 2021

GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub
Co-investigator on funded research projects
London School of Economics and Political Science
https://thegenderhub.com/projects/
01 Feb 2019
31 Oct 2024

Research outputs

Women’s tacit, uncoded knowledge ownership and value in conflict zones

Raina, N. 2023. Women’s tacit, uncoded knowledge ownership and value in conflict zones. in: Deepwell, K. (ed.) De-/anti-/post-colonial feminisms in contemporary art and textile crafts London, UK KT Press.

Transforming conflict and displacement through Arts and Humanities

Raina, N. 2021. Transforming conflict and displacement through Arts and Humanities. Praxis - Displacement and Conflict Nexus Event. Leeds University Feb 2021

The Practices of Making

Raina, N. 2022. The Practices of Making.

Afghan Solidarity Coalition - submission to Defence Committee: Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Raina, N. and Blitz, B. 2021. Afghan Solidarity Coalition - submission to Defence Committee: Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Parliamentary Committee on Defence.

Failing and forgetting Afghanistan

Raina, N. 2021. Failing and forgetting Afghanistan. The Gender, Justice and Security Hub.

We tried to get eligible Afghans out of Kabul. British officials did little to help [News article]

Raina, N. and Blitz, B. 2021. We tried to get eligible Afghans out of Kabul. British officials did little to help [News article]. Telegraph Media Group Limited.

Women, culture, knowledge and solutions

Raina, N. 2021. Women, culture, knowledge and solutions. Collaborations and Partnerships for Climate. London, UK 23 Jun 2022

The value of traditional knowledge to women in fragile locations

Raina, N. 2021. The value of traditional knowledge to women in fragile locations. UCLA Center for India and South Asia (CISA) Speaker Series: : The Value of Traditional Knowledge to Women in Fragile Places. Online webinar 01 - 01 Mar 2021

COVID-19 as a global challenge: towards an inclusive and sustainable future

Lambert, H., Gupte, J., Fletcher, H., Hammond, L., Lowe, N., Pelling, M., Raina, N., Shahid, T. and Shanks, K. 2020. COVID-19 as a global challenge: towards an inclusive and sustainable future. The Lancet Planetary Health. 4 (8), pp. 312-314. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30168-6

The value of culture in conflict

Raina, N. and Hussain, F. 2017. The value of culture in conflict. National College of Art, Rawalpindi, Islamabad 17 Oct 2017

Fabric of India - a lecture

Raina, N. 2015. Fabric of India - a lecture. Fabric of India Exhibition and Conference. Victoria and Albert Museum, London 03 Oct 2015 - 10 Jan 2016 London, UK Victoria and Albert Museum.

Reconstruction of Kashmir and the role of Islam

Raina, N. 2014. Reconstruction of Kashmir and the role of Islam. in: Lindberg, A. and Fennell, S. (ed.) Gender and Islam: perspectives from South Asia Routledge.

Research Impact

All Party Parliamentary Group - Afghan Women and GirlsEquality and the UK asylum process Fourth Report of Session 2022–23A Design Sprint for the Creative Industries Sector Vision

To further understand the wider economic spillover value of the Creative Industries to other sectors, a policy co-design sprint, commissioned by DCMS and the Creative Industries challenge team at UKRI (hereafter referred to as UKRI), and led by the Design Council, was undertaken to develop an understanding of how government and industry led interventions could help maximise this value. This took place alongside work commissioned by DCMS from Frontier Economics to explore an approach to data collection on economic spillovers to build the evidence of wider economy impacts.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan Fifth Report of Session 2022–23
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