She is an academic, researcher and activist with substantial experience in gender and human rights issues. She has country knowledge and experience of working in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Serbia, Denmark, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Ritu is a founder and moderator of the South Asian Sexual Health (SASH) Forum and an Editor of the AIDS-ASIA eForum.

She is also the Director of Spatial and Social Development Perspectives – UK.

http://ritumahendru.wordpress.com/about/

http://mishtimli.blogspot.com/

Priyali: Hi Ritu, welcome to the “Let’s Talk” blog which is a platform for people within higher education and those simply interested in it, to talk about the things that concern us.

First off, many congratulations on completing your doctorate in Sociology. Would you like to comment on your early career experiences now that you’ve got it under your belt? What are your career plans, and what do you think of the present job market in the UK and outside it?

Ritu: Thanks Priyali. As you are aware, opportunities for PhD graduates are sporadic. I have not had much success in securing a full time academic position in the UK, something that I was looking forward to after finishing my PhD. However, I have specific engagements with various UK universities. Elsewhere, I am in negotiation with universities to establish international programmes – this is a lengthy and time consuming process.

Preferably, I would like to teach Gender and Public Health from sociological perspectives, and engage myself in social research simultaneously. I do have a company and would like to keep that as a tool to continue my engagement with countries like India, Afghanistan, South Africa etc. It may appear that I am adhering to the doctrine of utilitarianism. However, the job market in the UK is bleak so I have created a job for myself and carved my own path. I am hoping that one day the situation within UK universities will change, and I will have a full-time position at a University here.

Priyali: What or whom do you hope to influence with your work as a social science researcher?

Ritu: I wouldn’t necessarily like to influence anyone. Instead, I would like to facilitate and/or provide space for discussions on the issues of migration, gender and health. This would create knowledge of social marginalization through theoretical and methodological understanding. I am interested in the conceptualisation of diasporas and health and how the two are deeply interlinked. I made initiatives to enable this dialogue and founded SASH – an online forum that attempts to address the sexual health needs of migrants  and diasporic communities in the UK.

Next post: 7 March. Dr. Mahendru comments on being able to work across cultures, and on career planning for doctoral researchers.

I’ve been pondering what to write for this post, as I haven’t been that successful with my work recently. At my last meeting my supervisor again expressed doubts about my main character’s voice — it’s not very believable.

Although I’m dismayed, I have to agree. Part of the problem is that I have shifted from third person to first person, so the original omniscient narrator’s voice is now too sophisticated for my surfer, tomboy, farm-raised, school-hating young girl.

I will admit to not having rewritten substantially — instead I went through and changed ‘she’ to ‘I’ and so forth, changing other bits that didn’t fit her voice as I went. Clearly, that didn’t work, didn’t go deep enough. Some of it does, but I’m not getting the strong characterisation and compelling identity for her that I want.

My rather lazy rewriting into the first person was picked up straight away by my supervisor months ago, but we have been concentrating on other problems — there are plenty of them (mostly structural) to keep me busy!

Having been a bit demoralised by all this, I haven’t written very much for the last two weeks, instead concentrating on some great books with strong voices. I’m currently on The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, which I find headache-inducing due to the lack of commas, but it certainly works as a first person narrative.

Then I found the fiction masterclass on first person voices in the latest issue of Mslexia. Jane Rogers, Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam Uni, talks about the pros and cons, how language used is key (for me, using Welsh and surfing terminology), the possibility of introducing other material to counterpoint the narrator, and uses Jane Eyre, Adrian Mole and Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly to illustrate her points. A happy coincidence, and just what I needed!

The fact that my own first person narrative doesn’t ring true is strange in a way, as I’ve written a diary every day almost since I could write. I still have my first diary, one of those chinese-embroidered books, with back to front letters and awful spelling, in a box with 20 or 30 others. For the last ten years or so it’s all been on the computer — I dread to think how much drivel is stored on my hard drive (and Dropbox)!

In the process of ‘journalling’ as the Americans like to call it, I’ve lost my self-consciousness and learned to just write, write, write whatever I want however I want, as it’s not for anyone else’s eyes. Some of it is some of my best writing, because I’m not worried about anything external like other people’s opinions. I’d recommend the process to anyone.

So I am sure I can write like this, and to get me going I’m starting a whole new chapter, forgetting the first three which I am, by now, rather tired of seeing! I’m going to have fun with it and really discover my character, who is very different from me (a good thing, says Jane). Wish me luck!