Professor Meena Dhanda is a leading scholar on caste and identity, focussing on casteism as a form of racism. Her research as a socially engaged political philosopher is transdisciplinary. She explores the conjugations of caste, class, gender, and race, drawing attention to the social injustices faced by oppressed groups, and their individual and collective resistance to domination.
Before coming to the UK in 1987 for her DPhil, as a Commonwealth Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford University, she had an MA in Philosophy and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Punjab University, India. At Oxford, Meena was also associated with St Hilda’s College as a Junior Research Fellow in 1990-91. She worked as a part-time Community Education Worker for young Asian women in 1991-92 for the Oxford County Council, before taking up a full-time lectureship in philosophy at the University of Wolverhampton (UoW) in 1992, where she was promoted, first as Reader, in 2010, and then as Professor in Philosophy and Cultural Politics, in 2018.
Meena was awarded The Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2010-2012, for primary research on her project Caste Aside: Dalit Punjabi Identity and Experience, and in 2013-2014, she was PI of an interdisciplinary project, Caste in Britian, funded by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, co-producing two major reports, which informed the government on how caste may be incorporated as an aspect of the protected characteristic of ‘race’ in the Equality Act 2010. Meena has twice received research funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 programme, most recently, as a member of the leading team from UoW in an International Training Network for ESRs from several countries researching on socially engaged art in the project FEINART. Very early on in her career, Meena was a member of the Ethics Committee of the Wolverhampton Health Executive, on non-medical criteria for the use of IVF. Lately, inclining towards cultural politics, she has steered the Citizen UK project of the National Portrait Gallery at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Amongst her other primary research is a UoW study conducted in 2008-9, Understanding Disparities in Student Attainment: Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Experience, the 2010 report from which became the basis of a cross-universities project DiSA, funded by The Higher Education Authority in 2010-12.
In her professional role, Meena has recently served as an elected executive member of the British Philosophical Association, of the British Association of South Asian Studies some years ago, and in several roles over many years, as executive member of the Society for Women in Philosophy, UK.
The eclectic range of her publications, spanning philosophy and Area Studies, includes, philosophical reflections on identity and belonging, anti-casteism, anti-racism, collective action, counter-rituals, killing in the name of ‘honour’, runaway marriages, gender quotas, and social justice, drawing on diverse thinkers like B. R. Ambedkar, J. P. Sartre, and I. M. Young, amongst others. She has published several articles and book chapters, and delivered scores of public talks, keynotes, guest lectures, and panel contributions, and is looking forward to consolidating her written publications.
Meena is the author of The Negotiation of Personal Identity (2008) and editor of Reservations for Women (2008). From 2019 onwards, she has co-edited special issues of academic journals, and guest co-edited a cross-journal special feature on Race and Racism in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). She is currently in the concluding stage of co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Punjab Studies.
During her three-year Visiting Professorship at the LSE Media and Communications department, Meena is writing Caste: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press. From 2023-2027, she is the General Editor of Racism by Context, a part of Oxford Intersections, soon to be launched as an online resource of interdisciplinary research articles organised in 11 sections, curated by a global team of subject specialist section editors. Alongside her writing and editing, Meena is also preparing the groundwork for a project on video self-documentation of an ongoing struggle of landless agricultural labourers for farming rights in the villages of Punjab, India.