Dr Jasjit Singh

Can you tell us about your research, work and expertise in Southeast Asia?

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science (PRHS). My research focuses on processes of religious and cultural transmission in the lives of British South Asians, in particular British Sikhs.

After receiving funding from CREST (the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats, part-funded by the ESRC and the UK security and intelligence agencies), I have focused my attention on the representations of minority ethnic religions. This research has led to me appearing as an academic commentator on Sikh affairs in mainstream media like BBC Radio 4, the Sikh Channel, and the BBC Asian Network's Big Debate.

Having developed a national and international profile as a ‘specialist’ on Sikhs in diaspora, my expertise has also been called on by statutory bodies, most recently by legal firms dealing with asylum cases relating to Afghan Sikhs.

In summer 2023 I was appointed as the inaugural CSGB Visiting Professor in Sikh Studies at the National University of Singapore. The Sikh community in Singapore is a super minority of 12,500 and this position provided me with the opportunity to teach students from a different social and cultural context to my own and to learn about how they perceive Sikhs and how these perceptions have been developed. It allowed me to research a relatively underexamined but very significant part of the Sikh diaspora.