Heila Sha

Profile

Dr Heila Sha (Saheira Haliel) is a Research Fellow at Leeds University Business School, with a research focus on labour shortage and skill formation in the UK and Europe. Saheira completed her PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany in July 2015. Her PhD research focused on inter-generational transformations of family life, care, and gender relations in response to urbanization, migration and socio-economic transformations in Northwest China. Based on her PhD dissertation, she published her first book in 2017, titled Care and Aging in Northwest China. In April 2016, she joined the University of Sussex (UK) as a postdoctoral research fellow. She was one of the members of an ERC-funded project entitled “Yiwu: Trust, Global Traders and Commodities in a Chinese International City” (TRODITIES). In this project, she extended her horizon by examining transnational lives, mobilities, and networks in the context of international migration. She built further expertise in multi-sited methodologies that bridge scales to connect globally diverse localities within transnational trading networks and commodity markets, examining the relationship between gender, enterprise and transnational marriage in the context of global trade liberalization. She also expanded her fieldwork experience, conducting ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in the global small commodity trading centre of Yiwu, a city on China’s East Coast, using multiple languages to interview both Chinese citizens and foreign traders from the Global South including the Middle-East, Central Asia, Africa and South Asia. In 2020, she joined the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR) as a research fellow at Coventry University. She worked on a South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub, focusing on migration intermediaries. Between 2022 and 2024, she worked at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship at Aston University, where she participated in and led projects related to ethnic minority/migrant entrepreneurship, business support to migrant entrepreneurs, and employment of economically inactive populations in West Midlands.