Dr Shahid Perwez

Profile

I consider myself an ethnographer by training, and have carried out fieldwork in villages of North and South India.  As a development and policy researcher, I specialise in conducting research that deals with contemporary social issues of public significance in the broader areas of gender, caste, and religion.

Over the years, my research has progressed from critically studying public policies of national and international governance on reproductive health of women and female children in the ethnographic contexts of Indian states of Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Bihar, examining issues/research questions of social and religious mobilisations that has policy relevance for the poor, the marginalised, and the Dalit groups in Andhra Pradesh.

I received my PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh under a competitive International Fellowship Program, administered by the Ford Foundation. My doctoral research deals with issues of gender inequality and child survival in a biomedically and apparently socially developed state in South India, Tamil Nadu; it specifically explored the ethnographic context of female infanticide and sex selective abortion, along with a critique of state and non-state intervention (primarily NGOs) on these issues. 

At Bath, I am currently revising my doctoral manuscript for its publication into a book under the aegis of an alumni endowment fund.

My postdoctoral research has included:

• University of Durham: research project on new social movement involving a community of low caste Christian ex-untouchables in Andhra Pradesh, who recently embraced Judaism by claiming a physical kinship descent from the mythical Lost Tribes of Israel. My ethnographic insights into this unique strategy of identity politics and social mobilisation lend credence to an understanding of potential challenges that the movement poses to the ethnocentricity of Judaism the world over, and to the homogeneity of Dalit movement in India.

• UK Department for Education-commissioned study (at University of Warwick), undertaken by a multi-disciplinary team.  The outcome was the publication of a research report on the ethnographic implementation of the child death review process, which is currently being used by the Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards across England.

• Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency-funded research on mother and child healthcare accessibility in two Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Bihar.  In the process of understanding cultural and political barriers in healthcare accessibility of the mothers, I have been led to the threshold of exploring the role of informal and illicit brokers in development of Indian state of Bihar, who are increasingly taking up the unsolicited role of facilitating government’s policies and programmes to the people.  The government has ostensibly turned a blind eye to their very ubiquitous presence at the micro level Is this a case of 'the retreat of the state' from below? What are some of the implications of this form of corruption for development? This is my current research interest, and I will soon be embarking on another round of fieldwork in Bihar, in an engagement entirely with the district-level brokers.

Publications