Shoba Arun

Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dr Shoba Arun completed her PhD from the University of Manchester (1999), after which she joined as Lecturer in International Development, at the University of Ulster. She has many years of experience in teaching in sociology and international development. As a Senior Fellow of the HEA, Shoba Arun is an active and enthusiastic academic with substantial teaching and research interests. Her research goals are to better understand processes of global social change, as these processes are expressed in particular social and spatial contexts and differently, among diverse social constituencies. Her scholarship on sociology of development is seen in her overall research, teaching, and outreach activities, particularly on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of social and economic change, and engages this approach to undertake a number of parallel but distinct research interests. Foremost, her research publications and expertise concern gender matters in the global society and the knowledge economy. This includes research in the areas of neo-liberal policies and impact on digital technologies, and its impact on gender and the labour market. In doing so, she has an international standing in this field of gender research in a sociological analysis of development informatics. Her publications have informed policy reports and scholarly debates on the impact of IT based services within the gendered labour market, thus building such knowledge through engaged research with a wide range of constituencies. In addition her research focussing on how societal contexts respond to policies, and identify constraints in development pathways through the intersecting axis of social divisions of gender, ethnicity and class, illustrate the scope and meaning of development in a globalising world and can be seen in her work on assets, social networks among diverse households in India. Her research into global mobilities among skilled migrants also exposes gendered and racialised processes of global change.