Rai, Shirin M.

PERSONAL:

Education: Attended the University of Delhi, India; University of Cambridge, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Warwick, England. E-mail—[email protected]

CAREER:

University of Warwick, Warwick, England, department of politics and international studies, began as lecturer, became professor, 1989—; United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, consultant.

MEMBER:

South Asian Regional Network on Gender, Law and Governance (founding member).

WRITINGS:

Resistance and Reaction: University Politics in Post-Mao China, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor, with others) Women in the Face of Change: The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, Routledge (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor, with Geraldine Lievesley) Women and the State: International Perspectives, Taylor & Francis (Bristol, PA), 1996.

(Editor, with Robert Fine) Civil Society: Democratic Perspectives, F. Cass (Portland, OR), 1997.

(Editor, with Robin Cohen) Global Social Movements, Athlone Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2000.

(Editor) International Perspectives on Gender and Democratisation, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor, with others) Development and the Challenge of Globalization, ITDG (London, England), 2002.

(Editor, with others) Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Global/Local World, Routledge (New York, NY), 2002.

Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalization, Polity Press (Malden, MA), 2002.

(Editor) Mainstreaming Gender, Democratizing the State? Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 2003.

(With Catherine Hoskyns) Gendering International Political Economy, Center for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (Coventry, England), 2005.

Member of editorial boards, including Democratization and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

SIDELIGHTS:

Shirin M. Rai studied political science at the University of Delhi in India and then earned her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. She joined the faculty of the University of Warwick in 1989, where she serves as a professor in the department of political and international studies. Rai's research interests include feminist politics, democratization, and development studies. She has worked with the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women as a consultant, and she is a founding member of the South Asian Regional Network on Gender, Law, and Governance. Rai has written or edited a number of books on issues of gender, governance, and democratization. Women and the State: International Perspectives, which Rai edited, looks at the ways in which alterations in a nation's political regime or the state can affect women's political organizations. Writing for the Latin American Research Review, Tracy Fitzsimmons remarked: "For those just starting out in the field, Shim Rai's introduction serves as a useful primer on how Western theories about the state—even feminist state theory—have virtually ignored the relationship between third world women and postcolonial states." Kathleen Staudt, writing for Gender & Society, noted: "As scholars embark on deeper and critical attention to women in these states, more work will be needed to cross the national and academic boundaries productive of new perspectives in this area."

Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalization analyzes nationalism, globalization, global restructuring, and government during the twentieth century, while looking at how gender and attitudes toward gender affected these constructs. Rai takes both the global scale and the small communities into account in her analysis, and she uses examples that apply all over the world, such as that of the manufactured energy shortages that took place both in the United States and in other countries. She also focuses on regions where inequalities by gender are still commonplace. Kathleen Staudt, in a review for the Political Science Quarterly, wrote that "Shirin Rai has produced nothing short of a gendered account of the twentieth century, using a theoretical frame with implications for practice: political engagement with a gendered lens." In a review for the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, Lisa Kowalchuk remarked that "the historical and geographic scope of the book is impressive. It spans the globe, transcending the north-south divide to include the former east block countries, and examines policy and discourse from the colonial era to the present."

Mainstreaming Gender, Democratizing the State? Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women, which Rai edited, collects case studies from a variety of countries regarding how gender and female advancement relates to state policies and compares female behavior on an international scale. Nora Gresch, writing for the NWSA Journal, remarked that the book "gives detailed insight into the working processes of national machineries for women regarding the advancement of gender mainstreaming policies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Gender & Society, October, 1997, Kathleen Staudt, review of Women and the State: International Perspectives, p. 701.

Latin American Research Review, spring, 2000, Tracy Fitzsimmons, review of Women and the State, p. 216.

NWSA Journal, spring, 2006, Nora Gresch, "Technologies of Governmentality and the Question of Feminist Politics: New Literature on the Relationships between National Narratives, Law, and Identity Formation," p. 207.

Political Science Quarterly, spring, 2003, Kathleen Staudt, review of Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalization, p. 167.

ONLINE

Canadian Journal of Sociology Online,http://cjsonline.ca/ (November-December, 2002), Lisa Kowalchuk, review of Gender and the Political Economy of Development.

South Asian Research Network Web site,http://www.sarn-glg.net/ (April 7, 2007), author biography.

University of Warwick Web site,http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/ (April 7, 2007), faculty biography.