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Dr Mirna Guha

Visiting Senior Fellow in Gendered Violence and Social Justice

Email
research@uos.ac.uk
School/Directorate
Research Directorate

Dr Mirna Guha is a visiting senior fellow in the Institute for Social Justice and Crime.

Mirna is a political sociologist and an intersectional scholar whose research specialisms include gendered violence, gender and development, and social (in)justice in the lives of marginalised communities globally. In the UK, Mirna has been researching the domestic abuse vulnerabilities of global majority women in East England since 2021, with a view to improve service provision in a historically under researched and underserved region. In early 2024, she was awarded a Medical Research Council-UK Prevention Research Partnership funded VISION grant for a project titled ''Nothing about us without us’: Investigating the impact of the leadership of global majority women on domestic abuse service provision in East England' with ISJC colleagues including co-investigator Dr Katherine Allen and project advisor Professor Miranda Horvath

Mirna holds a PhD in International Development from the University of East Anglia and has published findings in leading interdisciplinary and practitioners- focused journals viz. Gender, Place and Culture, Contemporary South Asia, and Gender and Development. She has co-edited a special section on the governance of sex work in India in Contemporary South Asia, and a special issue on the future of teaching gender and development in Development in Practice, and co-convenes the Development Studies Association's  'Women and Development' study group. She is in the process of developing a monograph which draws on her doctoral research on everyday violence in the lives of socio-economically marginalised women who sell sex in India.

Guha, M., 2024 Everyday violence and care: insights from fictive kin relations between madams and sex workers in India. Contemporary South Asia pp.1-16 https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2024.2340590

Guha, M., 2019. ‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India.
Gender, Place & Culture, 26(1), pp.128-144.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1574720

Guha, M., 2019. ‘Do you really want to hear about my life?’: doing ‘feminist research’ with women in sex work in Eastern India.
Gender & Development, 27(3), pp.505-521.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2019.1664045

Guha, M., 2019.   'Disrupting the 'life-cycle' of violence in social relations: recommendations for anti-trafficking interventions from an analysis of pathways out of sex work for women in Eastern India'
https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2018.1429098
Gender & Development, 26:1, 53-69,

Book chapter and contributions

Guha, M., 2020.
      '"I entered this life because my husband left me, I have to be careful now": A study of domesticity, intimacy and belonging in the lives of women in sex work in a red-light area in Eastern India’ in J. Carter and L. Arocha (eds.) Romantic relationships in a time of cold intimacies. London: Palgrave.

Gajjala, R., Guha, M et al. 2019.   ‘Gender Indian Digital Publics: Digital Streets’, in
Gajjala, R., 2019. Digital Diasporas: Labor and Affect in Gendered Indian Digital Publics.
Rowman & Littlefield International.

Editorial contributions

Lead editor Contemporary South Asia, Special Section. Contestations and contradictions: feminist research on structures and institutions governing sex work in India. Published Online, 2nd May 2024.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2024.2344782

Editorial team: Dr Kimberly Walters, California Long State University Long Beach, USA; Dr John Zavos, The University of Manchester

Guest editor      
Development in Practice. Special Issue. The Future of Teaching Gender and Development. Forthcoming 2024  

Editorial team: Dr Patrick Kilby, Australian National University, Australia; Dr Joyce Wu, University of New South Wales, Australia; Dr Emily Finlay, Monash University, Australia; Dr Rishita Nandagiri, Kings’ College, London, Dr Rebecca Gordon, University of West Scotland

Blog, open space, podcast contributions, book review

Guha, M., 2019    ‘Dynamic Lives, Dynamic Identities: Representing Agency and Victimhood Within the Lives of Women in Sex Work’. The Sociological Review, Politics of Representation (Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge) collection.

Guha, M., 2019    Podcast: What does feminist research really look like?
Gender and Development, Feminist Values in Research
Volume 27, Issue 3
Interviewed by editor Liz Cooke; one of three selected contributors to the issue.

Guha, M., 2018    Sartorially weaving their way through bhodrota (respectability): Georgette sarees, bangles and selling sex in a Kolkata neighbourhood.
International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5(2), pp.399-405
https://doi.org/10.1386/infs.5.2.399_7

British Sociological Association      Member
Development Studies Association Member
DSA Women and Development Study Group Convenor