Dr Shabna Begum

Shabna Begum worked as a teacher and Head of Social Science in London schools for over 20 years. She taught A level Politics and Sociology and also led on anti-racist school initiatives in comprehensive secondary schools.

In 2018 she started a PhD at Queen Mary University London where she started with her own family’s experience of migration and racism in 1970s east London as an entry point to a wider community history around a Bengal squatters’ movement. She completed that doctoral research in 2021 and she went on to translate that into a book ‘From Sylhet to Spitalfields: Bengali Squatters in 1970s east London’ published with Lawrence and Wishart, 2022.

She joined the Runnymede Trust in 2021 as a senior researcher and worked her way up to become director of research, before taking on the interim chief executive officer position in 2023 and securing the permanent role in 2024.

Her work has been at the heart of all the Runnymede Trust’s recent projects, including our research on education including art education, police in schools, and more broadly around the cost-of-living crisis, the experiences of women of colour in the workplace, and racism in migration debates.