Faiza Shaheen

Faiza Shaheen (born 1982/1983) is a British academic in the field of economic inequality.

Early life and education

Shaheen was born in Leytonstone, in East London. Her father was a car mechanic from Fiji and her mother was a lab technician from Pakistan.

She attended Chingford Foundation School and St John's College, Oxford University, where she read philosophy, politics and economics. Shaheen also holds an MSc in Research Methods & Statistics and a PhD from the University of Manchester.

Career

From 2007 to 2009 Shaheen worked at the Centre for Cities, and before that at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies, University of Bristol. From 2009 to 2014 she was senior researcher on economic inequality at the New Economics Foundation, then until 2016 she was head of Inequality and Sustainable Development at Save the Children UK. From 2016 to 2021 she was the director of the Center for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS), a policy think tank originating from the trade union movement.

Shaheen is a regular contributor to debates on television news programmes, including ''Newsnight'' and ''Channel 4 News'', and has worked with Channel 4 and the BBC to develop documentaries on inequality.

Since January 2021 Shaheen has been the Program Director, Inequality and Exclusion of the Pathfinders in the Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies program at the Center on International Cooperation, New York University. She is also visiting professor in practice at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics.

Politics

Shaheen is a longtime Labour voter and claims to have been politicised from an early age. She joined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015.

In 2017, ''The Guardian'' identified her as a "rising star". In the same year, she was nominated for Asian Woman of the Year at the Asian Achievers Awards and included in the Top 100 Influencers on the Left list.

Shaheen was selected to be the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party for Chingford and Woodford Green in July 2018; at the 2019 general election, although the Labour vote increased slightly, she finished second behind the incumbent, Iain Duncan Smith. In July 2022, Shaheen was subsequently selected to contest Chingford and Woodford Green again as the Labour Party's Parliamentary candidate at the next United Kingdom general election.

Shaheen's re-selection was criticised by the ''The Jewish Chronicle'', due to her having been a "vocal supporter of Corbyn", who had "campaigned with controversial leftwing filmmaker Ken Loach, and supported Jewish Voice for Labour's Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi". The newspaper quoted Lord Austin as saying "This shows the influence the Corbyn-supporting hard left still have in the Labour Party and how much work is needed to return the party to mainstream centre-ground politics." The newspaper noted that in 2018, on Sky News, Shaheen had defended Corbyn's attendance at a ceremony in 2014, in which a photo appeared to show him standing opposite the graves of Atef Bseiso and Salah Khalaf, two senior Palestine Liberation Organization officers who had been accused of links to a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, which had killed 11 Israelis.

It was reported in February 2023 that Shaheen had called Israel an "apartheid" state, in line with human rights groups Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem, and referred to a boycott of its goods as "crucial". In addition, ''The Telegraph'' noted that Shaheen had thanked the people who had toppled the Edward Colston statue during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Speaking to ''The Guardian'' in May 2023, Shaheen claimed that the Labour Party's "machinery" did not want her to run again. In the same interview, Shaheen voiced her objection to "white working class" as a separate racial category, stating, "Since when did the working class become white? It's a mythology."

Personal life

Shaheen is married to the actor Akin Gazi.

Bibliography

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shaheen, Faiza
1983 births
Living people
Academics of the London School of Economics
Alumni of St John's College, Oxford
Alumni of the University of Manchester
British Muslims
British women economists
Center on International Cooperation
English people of Indo-Fijian descent
English people of Pakistani descent
Labour Party (UK) parliamentary candidates
People from Chingford