Political Representation of Ethnic Minorities in UK in Comparative Perspective
I am a co-organiser of an ESRC sponsored research-seminar series with Institute of Social Change (ISC) and Democracy, Citizens and Elections Research Network (DCERN) at the University of Manchester. I am covening the second seminar in the series, to take place in Oxford on the 13th of April
http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/socialchange/seminars/representation/seminar2.html

Political integration, citizenship and British Muslims
Political effects of diversity and political attitudes and behaviour of ethnic minorities are my main research interests. With the increasing interest in Muslim minorities specifically, I too have turned to this line of research. As always, my starting point is Britain, but I am actively exploring comparative perspective in these two projects.

I am currently pursuing two lines of analysis
1. Muslim citizens: integration, religiosity and political participation
- the first paper to arise from this research has been recently published
“Religious Extremism in Britain and British Muslims: Threatened Citizenship and the Role of Religion’ in The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin (eds.) 2009
- with subsequent papers I am further exploring the link between religiosity and integration or alienation of Muslim communities in Britain.

2. Representation of Muslims' public opinion
- this is a joint project with Sundas Ali, a doctoral student at Nuffield College
- we are analysing all Muslim public opinion polls (in the first instance following 7/7 bombings in 2005 and the cartoons controversy in 2006) and their reporting by the British broadsheet press


EMBES (Ethnic Minorities British Election Study)
I am a member of the team lead by Prof Anthony Heath, and including Prof David Sanders and Dr Steven Fisher, conducting the survey of over 2000 ethnic minorities in Britain at the next General Election. This is the first such study since 1997 and much larger in scale. It will be a probability-based sample.

This project is a natural follow-on from my doctoral research where I have analysed extensively the 1997 BES ethnic minority booster.