Dr Javeria Khadija Shah | The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

BA, MA, PGCE (PC), PhD, SFHEA

Job title

Member of the Principal's Office, Associate Director of the Centre for Inclusive Pedagogy and Practice

Courses

Research Degrees (PhD)

Orcid ID

0000-0002-6153-7763

j.shah@cssd.ac.uk

Social media

Twitter @JS_Diaspora

Institutional Repository

http://crco.cssd.ac.uk

Website

Linktree

PDF Version

Profile

I am an internationally recognised educationalist, cultural sociologist, and interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in policy, sociology, and the visual arts, focusing on post-compulsory creative arts education and teacher education. I have over 20 years of experience in the UK post-compulsory (14+) education sector, having worked in various roles such as teaching, managing, national qualification writing, external examination, curriculum design, teacher educator, and mentoring capacities. I have a strong track record of embedding inclusion and translating policy into practice in educational settings.

At Central, I am the Associate Director of the Centre for Inclusive Pedagogy and Practice and Senior Lecturer in Education and Inclusion. I am also part of the Principal’s Office and the Founding Director of the Social Performance Network. My responsibilities include overseeing the Learning Skills programme, which offers informal learning development to Central’s student body, and supporting the Director of Teaching and Learning in embedding equity across all of Central’s provisions. Additionally, I teach modules on research practice and decolonising research for the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP). I am the second PhD supervisor on the New Earth LAPH Collaborative Doctoral Award Scheme and a founding member of the Global Majority Staff Network and Ummah, Central’s Muslim staff and student collective.

In 2018, I established the Social Performance Network, a community of practice that focuses on connecting ideas of social performance and inequality using the concept of social theatre. The network collaborates with academic and practitioner communities within the arts, humanities, and social sciences to extend dialogue and practice that interrogates and explores socialisation to consider its impact on how we live and formulate our self-identities. Our work includes highlighting the work of Global Majority artists, the OffScript! Podcast featuring international voices on identity issues and our training consultancy services, offering interdisciplinary training in arts education, fostering inclusion, decolonisation, anti-racism, anti-Muslim hate, and teacher training (including Arts specialist teaching). Since 2019, I’ve assisted over 30 UK clients from various sectors in their journey towards anti-racism and inclusion.

As Principal Investigator of the My Name Is.™ project, I have been heavily engaged in raising awareness surrounding name pronunciation and identity and creating inclusive practices to enable a sense of belonging through public workshops and presentations. The project’s first articulation is a short documentary film made by Tony Giroux that captures the lived experiences of name navigation. You can learn more about this project in the external practice section below.

Outside Central, I hold an associate staff position at the Centre for Race, Education, and Decoloniality, Leeds Beckett University, and an associate consultant role at Dr Muna Abdi’s MA Education Consultancy CIC. This strand of my work is also articulated in my steering group membership of the International Network for Anti-Racist Educators and the Anti-Racist Teacher Educators Network. I am also an Advisory Board (inclusion specialist) member of US-based Musicology.

Outside of academia, I am an engaged activist and artist who uses improvisation and multimodal platforms, including spoken word, folk punk, and photography-based art, to conceptualise issues of identity and diaspora.

Areas of Expertise

Sociology of Education
Media and Film Studies
English Further Education (practice and contexts)
Britishness in postcolonial contexts
Social Performance (Shah, 2018)
Person-centred approaches to research
Socio-cultural and critical theories
Social Stratification (including race, class, and Muslimness)
Cultural Hegemony
Anti-Racist/Decolonial Practice
Learning Development
Teacher Education
Policy and Practice
Sufism and Movement

PhD Supervision

I can supervise projects centred on educational policy, arts education, media education, race, coloniality, Muslimness, decoloniality, social performance, race, and class, navigating marginalised identity, and Postcolonial Britishness. I can also support qualitative projects using sociological, poststructuralist, or socio-culturalist/critical theories.

Second Supervisor on the New Earth LAPH Collaborative Doctoral Award Scheme.

Key Publications

2023. ‘Blame the BAME’, in Covid-19 and racism: Counter-stories of colliding pandemics. ed. Lander, V., Kay, K. and Holloman, T.R, Bristol, UK: University of Bristol Press, pp 10 – 13.

2022. Shah, J., Imposed identities and British Further Education. 1st ed. New York: Living Places Publishing.

2021. ‘An Ecological Exploration of Whiteness: Using Imperial Hegemony and Racial Socialisation to Examine Lived Experiences and Social Performativity of Melanated Communities’, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness, ed. Shona Hunter and Christi van der Westhuizen, (London: Routledge), pp 280 – 293.

2019. ‘My relationship with the word P**i’ in A biography of the word P**i , ed. Karamat Iqbal, (UK: Amazon), pp 199 – 242.

2018. ‘Decolonising the Creative Arts Curriculum in White Spaces’, in Progress in Education Volume 56, ed. Roberta V. Nata, (New York: Nova Publishers), pp 185 – 220.

2017. ‘Informal Learning in a Digital Landscape: A Higher Education Drama Conservatoire Case Study’, in Informal Learning: Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities, ed. Stephen Rutherford, (New York: Nova Publishers), pp 135 – 185.