Michelle:
My current research focuses on two of the CRFR core themes: health, illness and wellbeing and environment and sustainability. You can read some of my research here.

I am currently conducting research focusing on students with caring responsibilities to identify facilitators and barriers to learning in higher education and optimum wellbeing. The objective is to develop a toolkit to support this sub-group of students. The study examines different stages of students’ journey, such as planning for pregnancy whilst in higher education, experiences of being pregnant during part-time or full-time study and balancing studies whilst caring for small children and/or relatives as paid or unpaid carers.

In past research, I explored the role that partners play during the trajectory of care for men with prostate cancer, as they navigate symptom experience, help-seeking, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care and impact on family life and relationships. Using a cultural lens, I explored the various types of relationships that facilitate or hinder help-seeking for men with prostate symptoms across two islands.

Relating to the environment and sustainability, together with colleagues, I am currently working on the impact of climate change for ethnic minority communities. This includes families who become displaced during crises events. We are exploring the complexities of using artificial intelligence to meet the humanitarian needs of families in disaster preparedness. It is increasingly clear that people from ethnic minority communities face unique challenges during crises events, however, research literature on this is scarce. You can read more about this in a few book chapters published here.

Via an international collaboration, we are conducting a systematic review examining the physiological impact of COVID-19 on racially minoritized pregnant women and newborns. We are focusing on the prevalence and morbidity of COVID-19 in racially minoritized pregnant women and the types of maternal and perinatal complications that result.

I also have an interest in the impact of unconscious bias and racism for ethnic minority families as a unit and hope to discuss this in a future blog, so please watch this space!

Kaveri:
My most recent major project was co-editing a special issue of Contemporary South Asia on Muslim women in South Asian contexts, with Patricia Jeffery. That collaboration brought together established and early-career scholars working on South Asian Muslim women’s everyday lives in Muslim-majority countries of South Asia, and from Muslim-minority countries including India, the UK and South Africa. It starts with some papers, including my own, on Muslim women’s legal agency with respect to the family, then moves on to papers on claims-making upon the state; livelihoods and reconciling paid and unpaid reproductive work; and the impact of male outmigration on so-called ‘left-behind’ wives. Together, the papers show the interrelations between the domains of everyday life that we explore, that is to say how women’s vulnerabilities in their families dovetail with the oppressions they experience in relation to the local state, the labour market, and in the streets.

I am currently co-editing a book, with Hadia Majid, Ghazal Zulfiqar and Karin Siegmann, bringing together academic and activist writings on how gender shapes productive and reproductive work in Pakistan. I am also co-editing a book, with Shalini Grover, on divorce in globalized Asia. My own writing will mostly be focusing on those collaborative projects.

I am also writing about the UK context. With CRFR-affiliated PhD student Pooja Marwaha, I am writing about the policing of interfaith and interracial marriages and same-sex desires among British South Asians. Together with Tanvi Rai and Anna Dowrick, I am writing new papers based on our interview study on diverse experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, thinking about the illness as managed and cared for in everyday domestic contexts.