Bina Fernandez is Associate Professor in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Previously, she held academic positions at the University of Leeds, the University of Oxford-Brookes, the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and the University of Oxford.
Bina completed her PhD and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford, and a Masters in Social Work (Urban and Rural Community Development) from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA.
Bina was an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow between 2015-2017. Previous to this, her externally funded research awards included a British Academy Small Grant in 2010 and the UNDP Human Development Fellowship for the Asia Pacific in 2005.
Bina has a professional background of over a decade in the development sector, where she has worked extensively with international NGOs, community organisations and governments in multiple countries. Her professional roles have included project management, as well as research and evaluation consultancies.
Research interests
Bina’s research focuses on gender, migration and social policy, draws on her professional experience, and aims to be relevant to policy practice. Her recent ARC DECRA project titled 'Reason to Care: making the care needs of migrants visible to social policy' analyses the care needs of Ethiopian migrants and refugees in Australia, Kenya and Lebanon. A recent output from this project is her monograph Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers: Migrant Agency and Social Change (Springer 2019).
She is keenly interested in feminist interventions in the state and policy processes, and her monograph Transformative Policy for Poor Women: a new feminist framework (Ashgate, 2012) presents an innovative new feminist framework for the analysis of policy in developing countries, and has been welcomed by reviewers as an important contribution to the analysis of the gap between well-intentioned, gender-sensitive policies and their often inadequate implementation.
Other ongoing topics of research interest within developing country contexts include:
* Rural poor women’s land, labour and livelihoods (supported by an Early Career Researcher Grant from the University of Melbourne).
* Queer feminist praxis in the politics of gender, race, class, caste and sexuality - work in this space has focussed on lesbian and gay rights, violence against lesbians in India, and queering perspectives on migration and care.
Find out more about Bina Fernandez' experience
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Bina Fernandez' selected work
Projects
Displaying the 4 most recent projects by Bina Fernandez.
Project Types
3
Internal Research Grant
1
Research Grant
Scholarly Works
Displaying the 35 most recent scholarly works by Bina Fernandez.
Honours, Awards and Fellowships
UNDP Human Development Fellow
Credentials
Positions
Associate Professor In Development Studies
Social And Political Sciences
Education
Development Studies
University of Oxford
Development Studies
University of Oxford
M.A in Social Work (Urban and Rural Community Development)
Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Cognition and Culture
Mount Holyoke College