Shaista Aziz Patel

Bio

Shaista Aziz Patel joined Ethnic Studies Department as a scholar of Critical Muslim Studies in July 2018. She received her PhD in Social Justice Education and graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. Before joining UCSD, Shaista taught courses as a sessional instructor in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at U of Toronto. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her primary research interests include diverse fields such as Critical Muslim, Dalit feminist and critical Caste studies and transnational feminist studies. Her past and future publications traverse discrepant spatialities and temporalities in order to re-examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of bodies, colonialism, race, caste, gender, religion, capitalism, and relations of labor. She is primarily interested in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in critical Muslim studies, critical caste studies. decolonial theory, questions of solidarity (from Palestine, North America, to Kashmir), and cultural and social movements with special emphasis on questions of non-Black, non-Indigenous people of color complicity in settler colonialism, white and Brahminical supremacies. Her work has appeared as book chapters from Palgrave Macmillan, University of British Columbia, McGill-Queen’s University, and Fernwood Presses. She’s also published articles in Theory & Event, Feral Feminisms (as co-editor of an issue), Cultural studies, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and Engaged Scholar Journal. Her co-edited book titled, Contestations and Compromise: Reading against Multiple Colonialities, Race, and Caste in the University will be published from the University of Alberta Press in 2025.