At SPERI Maya will conduct a new research project entitled ‘Centrism beyond methodological whiteness: Racism, the centre ground, and Britain’. With the rise of “national populism” and a resurgent far-right coinciding with increased incidences of racial violence, there are increasing calls for a return to the political centre ground. Responding to this, the project will focus on racism and the centre ground in British politics. It will place race at the core of analysis to develop a qualitative study of centrist political narratives and how these are related to by people of colour and migrants. Maya will research three intersecting case studies – ‘economic migrants’, (anti-)globalisation, and Englishness – to produce a new counter-history of British political development and provide a new contribution to our understanding of politics and race.
Maya joins SPERI from SOAS, University of London where she received her PhD in 2019. Her doctoral thesis explored race and processes of racialisation in British international development discourse about India between 1997-2017. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, published by Verso in 2019. Maya has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and the New York Times, among others.