Parvati Nair

• Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies, Queen Mary University of London

Parvati Nair writes on photography and the nexus of migration and culture. Her interests lie in the dynamics of migration at grass-roots level, in the intersections of the global and the local through migration, as well as in the ways in which human mobilities are mediated through photography. Her work aims to construct a better understanding of how policies and practices shape one another, affecting both the ways in which migrants, refugees and strangers may relocate and how communities, localities and places evolve through the movements and weaves of people. She has taught and published widely on sociocultural aspects of migration, with a particular interest in the visual representations of displacement, especially photography.

She is currently Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies at Queen Mary University of London, engaging in research and doctoral supervision.

Parvati Nair worked at the United Nations University from 2012 to 2019 to found and direct the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM), based in Barcelona. In 2019, she joined the UNU Vice-Rectorate in Europe as Special Adviser on Migration. At UNU, she led policy-relevant research in the areas of migration and gender, migration and cities, statelessness, transcontinental migration, and intercultural dialogue. In 2017, she was involved in coordinating UNU's Chairmanship of the Global Migration Group, a forum of twenty-two agencies of the United Nations system, working at the time towards supporting the processes that led to the adoption in 2018 of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Her roles included supporting UNU's continued focus on and expertise in migration, together with engagement with the UN system on the topic in a shared effort to ensure good governance.

Notable among Parvati Nair's publications are her books: Displacement, Environments, and Photo-Politics in the Mediterranean: Migrant Sea (Routledge, 2024), which focuses on the ways in which photography of and by displaced persons shapes opinions, policies and perspectives; and of A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado (2011, Duke University Press), which considered root drivers of mass global displacement, such as poverty, conflict, inequalities and climate change, through photography. IAs well as being on the editorial boards of several journals, she is also the founder and Principal Editor of the refereed academic journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture. Parvati Nair has also published in the media and other non-academic forums.

Parvati Nair is a national of the United Kingdom and an Overseas Citizen of India. She was born in Oslo, Norway and spent her childhood and adolescence in India, Poland, Morocco, Tunisia and Spain, before relocating to London. She speaks several languages and is bilingual in English and Spanish.

• –present Director of United Nations University Institute on Globalisation, Culture and Mobility, United Nations University

• 2001 University of London, PhD

Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Member of the Academia Europea

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