Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

Dr Tania Saeed is Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

She is trained as a qualitative researcher with a focus on Comparative and International Education, examining education in relation to securitization, citizenship and social justice. Her work ranges from exploring Islamophobia and securitization in the context of universities in the UK, to the increasing securitization of education in Pakistan.

She is the author of Islamophobia and Securitization. Religion, Ethnicity and the Female Voice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Youth and the National Narrative. Education, Terrorism and the Security State in Pakistan (Bloomsbury UK, 2020). She is the elected Chair for the South Asia Special Interest Group (SA SIG) at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) (2019-21). She has been consulting on donor led education projects in Pakistan, and has engaged with policy makers, contributing to policy reports and discussions on Islamophobia in the US and the UK.

Her more recent research explores ideologies of exclusion within educational institutions: the first project focuses on school curriculum, textbooks and teaching through a qualitative exploration of government, low fee private and refugee schools in Pakistan; the second project focuses on neoliberalism and Higher Education in Pakistan, examined through student, academic and administrative narratives of the changing university in relation to internationalization and global competition.

She is also the Co-Investigator for the Education, Justice and Memory (EdJam) Network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF) Network Plus (2020-2024). The project brings together academics and civil society partners across Pakistan, Uganda, Cambodia, Columbia and the UK in exploring innovative pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning about violent histories in order to understand the possibility of “memory work” within peace education and beyond educational institutions.

Saeed has a DPhil (PhD) in Education from the University of Oxford where she was a Wingate scholar (2011-2012), and an HEC Pakistan Overseas PhD scholar (2008-2011), and an MSc in Gender, Development and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).