Padmaja Barua

Arbeids- og kompetanseområde

I am a trained Social worker with a Master's degree in Social Work obtained from the Delhi School of Social Work, University of Delhi in 1998. In addition, I have a Master's in Gender and Development from 2007, from the University of Bergen, Norway. I obtained my PhD in Gender and Development in 2018 from the HEMIL Center, University of Bergen,Norway. I also hold a post-graduate diploma in Counselling Psychology from the Xavier's Institute of Counselling Psychology in Mumbai, India. I have over two decades of work experience in the area of higher education as an academic  and from the field as a practitoner where I  have worked in a diversity of development aid and social work settings in areas such as human trafficking of girls and women, women's empowerment, primary education of marginalised children, sex work and substance abuse, both at the programme and managerial levels. 

My Phd project was centered around analysing relations between paid domestic workers and their employers in contemporary India , and also investigating the impact of trade union organisation and mobilisation on paid domestic workers in Mumbai, India. I have published many articles on this theme in journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Forum for Development Studies and Studies in International Comparative Development. 

My research interests are located at the intersections of paid domestic and care work, informal and precarious labour, labour movements, social movements , marginalisation, inequality and social problems, gender and migration, gender and development and sociological understandings of power and agency.