Alpa Parmar

Alpa read Social and Political Sciences as an undergraduate at Cambridge and also completed her doctorate at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge, in which she empirically examined perceptions of Asian criminality in the UK. Her PhD was part of the Peterborough Adolescent Development Study which is an ongoing longitudinal project in the UK.  Following completion of her PhD, Alpa held a British Academy Postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Law at King's College London during which she researched police stop and search practices under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the consequences of counter-terrorist polices for minority ethnic groups - particularly British Asian people. Theoretically her research considers the implications of security practices upon notions of belonging and ethnic identity, and experiences of multi-cultural citizenry. During her postdoctoral fellowship, Alpa was a visiting scholar at Berkeley, University of California, at which time she conducted a comparative policing study on stop and search and stop and frisk. Her book Crime and the Asian Community is forthcoming (Oxford University Press) and her recent publications include 'Configuring Ethnic Identities: resistance as a response to counter-terrorist policy' (2014) in New Directions in Race, Ethnicity and Crime. Alpa's research focuses on the intersections between race, gender and criminalization and her current research projects explore the policing of migration in the UK and minority ethnic life stories of offending. Alpa is also interested in the intersection of securitization and race its consequences for people crossing borders across the world.