Dr Aarti Ratna

Aarti is a sociologist of race, gender and sexualities. She specialises in research about sport, lesiure and popular culture. She is widely published in this area, writing agenda setting text particularly in the area of British South Asian women's sport and leisure engagements. 

Aarti has a successful track record of winning a range of public, academic and voluntary sector funding grants, amassing more than half a million pounds in total. Funders have included the British Academy, the Arts Humanities Research Council, the National Lottery Community Foundation, Sports England, the UK Home Office, and West Yorkshire Police. Some of this project work has been done as a research consultant with the charity organisation Community Lions Foundation. She is currently working on a recently funded UKRI/ESRC Missions Accelerator Programme, Safer Stadiums, to tackle violence against women fans of the men's game.

Her external service, more broadly, has included roles as Chair of the journal Leisure Studies, as an Associate Editor (Sociology) for Communications in Humanities and Social Sciences, and as an editorial board member of the Sociology of Sport Journal. She has also served as the Co-Chair of the British Sociological Association's Sport Study group. She is currently Managing Editor for the Routledge Critical Studies in sport Series and a Co-Editor for the Palgrave Book series New Femininities in Physical, Digital and Sporting Cultures.

She has overseen four students to successful PhD completion and examined a number of doctoral studies including through public defence. She is currently co-supervising two students broadly in the area of race, migration and diaspora studies.

As a passionate scholar and teacher, Aarti has also served the various institutions in which she has worked as programme leader, teaching and learning department lead, Co-Chair of a University Race and Equality group, ethics committee member and, also, she founded and led her own research centre, the Leisure Studies Research Group at Solent Southampton University. Across these leadership positions, Aarti has remained committed to the politics of equity and widening participation.

Aarti's monograph with US publishers Rutgers University Press, entitled "A Nation of Family and Friends? Sport and the Leisure Cultures of British Asian Girls and Women", was published in April 2024. See here