Alison Shaw

Alison Shaw 

Professor of Social Anthropology 

Affiliation: School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
Expert in: Health and migration; Transnationalism
Geographic focus: Pakistan, South Asia

Alison Shaw's research interests are in the anthropology of medical genetics and genetic screening; consanguineous marriage; Pakistan/South Asia; migration, health and transnational cultural movements.

Alison Shaw's first fieldwork in Pakistan and the UK in the early 1980s resulted in a pioneering study of British Pakistani practices of transnational kinship and marriage.   She updated her original monograph with fieldwork conducted in the 1990s, published as Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani families in Britain (2000).  She then conducted fieldwork with British Pakistani families with children with genetic problems: Negotiating Risk: British Pakistani experiences of genetics  (2009) examines discrepancies between patients' and clinicians' understandings of genetic risk and inheritance in the context of referrals to medical genetics. She has also taught Urdu professionally and trained teachers of Urdu in adult education. Recently, she has worked on a comparative examination of the social, political and health impact of discourses of genetic risk in consanguineous marriage in Europe, South Asia and the Middle East: Cousin Marriages: between tradition, genetic risk, and cultural change (2015)