This event marks the launch of Migrant Memory and the Post-colonial Imagination dominated by Sikhs.
ted by Sikhs. She has also worked with a refugee organisation to think about
(MMPI); a five-year project funded by The Leverhulme Trust. Responding to the urgent
need to research how memories of Partition continue to shape contemporary British
Asian community relations, it will explore how community identities, including a sense of
Britishness, are produced and articulated by South Asian people in the UK through
cultural practices and social processes of remembering the 1947 Partition of India.
memoriesofpartition.co.uk
@partitionmemory
Speaker Biographies
Dawinder Bansal is an award-winning creative producer. She recently curated Jambo
Cinema at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, a project inspired by growing up in her parents’
corner shop, which sold electrical supplies and rented VHS video films to
Wolverhampton’s Indian and Pakistani migrant communities. Her production for the
Southbank Centre, Mother Tongues From Farther Lands, was a finalist in the Best
Stage Production category at the 2017 Asian Media Awards. For the past decade she
has led on a diverse mix of theatre productions/projects and events.
dawinderbansal.com
@DawinderBansal
Raminder Kaur Kaholn is Professor of Anthropology & Cultural Studies at Sussex
Centre for Cultural Studies, Sussex University. She has four main research areas: (i)
public culture, aesthetics, censorship, history and politics in South Asia; (ii) diaspora,
race/ethnicity, the creative arts and heritage; (iii) public representations of, and the
socio-political and environmental implications of nuclear developments; (iv) 'cultures of
sustainability'. She works with arts organisations and has written scripts for numerous
theatre productions, including Silent Sisters, based on research with British Asians
about Partition, migration and refugees. Her most recent book is Atomic Mumbai: Living
with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (Routledge, 2013).
sussex.academia.edu/RaminderKaur
sussex.ac.uk/profiles/158815
Churnjeet Mahn is Chanceller’s Fellow in the Department of English at the University
of Strathclyde. She is co-editor of Partition and the Practice of Memory (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), which attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-
Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders; and the ways in which such memories are both
allowed for and erased in the present. More broadly, her research explores travel
writing, cultural memory and heritage; and race and sexuality. She has collaborated
with the Cultural Resource Conservation Initiative to work on grassroots conservation
initiatives in an area of East Punjab that was historically Muslim, but post-partition, is
how to create and sustain inclusive LGBT spaces, especially in a youth context.
strath.ac.uk/staff/mahnchurnjeetdr
@churnjeet
Pippa Virdee is a Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History in the School of
Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester. She researches British colonial history
and the history of the Punjab, with a particular focus on the Partition and its legacies;
the construction of identity in colonial and post-colonial India and Pakistan; and the
contributions of marginalised voices. She is the author of From the Ashes of 1947:
Reimagining Punjab (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Current research explores the
role of women and gender politics in Pakistan; the South Asian Disapora in Britain; and
the transformation of cities such as Leicester and Coventry.
dmu.academia.edu/PippaVirdee
@pippavirdee
Kevin Ryan is the CEO of Charnwood Arts, a Loughborough based community arts,
education and media organisation who are partners on MMPI. The organisation is
considered a national flagship for participatory arts practice in England. Kevin is also a
founder member and director of Mailout, the national magazine for participatory arts in
the UK. His experience spans projects and programmes across a number of forms,
including project work in Europe, India, the Palestinian West Bank and China.
charnwoodarts.com
@kaparu2
Kazi Ruksana Begum is the Arts Development Officer for the London Borough of
Tower Hamlets. She is the producer for A Season of Bangla Drama, a festival of
Bengali dance, music and theatre. She has worked with Queen Mary University to
devleop partnerships between London’s Bengali community, students, researchers,
policymakers and artists.
towerhamletsarts.org.uk
@ASeasonBanglaD
* * * *
Today’s event has been co-organised with Radar, Loughborough University’s
contemporary art programme. Radar commissions projects that draw from and
contribute to research undertaken across Loughborough University’s two campuses.
Radar will continue to work with the MMPI team for the duration of the project.
arts.lboro.ac.uk/radar/
@radarlboro
Thank-you to everyone else who has helped with the organisation of today’s event.
Migrant Memory and the Post-colonial Imagination Project Team

Emily Keightley is MMPI’s Principal Investigator and Professor of Media and Memory Studies in
Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her resaerch concerns memory, time and its
mediation in everyday life. She is particularly interested media’s role in the relationship between
individual, social and cultural memory. Her most recent book is Memory and the Management of
Change: Repossessing the Past,co-authored with Michael Pickering (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh is a Research Associate on MMPI, based at Loughborough University.

Her research explores how South Asian cultural practices (especially music) reproduce
structures of power and inequality, such as gender and class. Her work spans disciplines,
synthesising perspectives from ethnomusicology, sound studies and music analysis; as well as
drawing on new theoretical work on affect and emotion.

Diwas Bisht is a doctoral researcher on MMPI, based at Loughborough University. His research
aims to understand the intergenerational transmission of memories of Partition in the British
South Asian community. It focuses on the use of animation and arts based methodologies as a
primary tool of enquiry.

Clelia Clini is a Research Associate on MMPI, based at Loughborough University London. Her
research interests include Indian popular cinema and the Indian diaspora; narratives of identity
and belonging in South Asian diasporic literature and films; immigrants’ experiences in Italy in
relation to cinema, media and music; representation of minorities and terrorism narratives in
Indian popular cinema; and forced displacement, creativity and wellbeing.
2pm – 2.10pm: Welcome address, Professor Emily Keightley
Julia Giese is a doctoral researcher on MMPI, based at Loughborough University London. She
is exploring the gendered, racialized, sexualized and religionized nature of Partition memory 2.10pm – 2.30pm: Dr Pippa Virdee
among the Bangladeshi community in the Tower Hamlets. By focussing on the body as a carrier
2.30pm – 2.50pm: Dawinder Bansal
of memory and identity, she aims to deconstruct discourses of South Asian Partition
historiography. Working with East London Dance, she will employ critical dance methodologies 2.50pm – 3.10pm: Professor Raminder Kaur Kahlon
in her research.
Break
Mona Khan is a doctoral researcher on MMPI, based at Loughborough University London. Her
research is concerned with how memories of Partition are communicated online. 3.20pm – 3.40pm: Dr Churnjeet Mahn

Nathan Ritchie is a doctoral researcher on MMPI, based at Loughborough University. His

3.40pm – 3.50pm: Kevin Ryan
project explores how memories continue to be mobilised since the event. Specifically, he is 3.50pm – 4.00pm: Kazi Ruksana Begum
interested in how newspapers continue to report and feature events surrounding the partition.
4.00pm – 4.45pm: Discussion with attendees
Denise Wade is Project Administrator; and also works as the ESRC Doctoral Training
4.45pm: Drinks Reception
Partnership Administrator in the School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences at
Loughborough University.

#MMPILaunch