In the third Urban Work Webinar Series we discussed with Nazima Kadir and Ralf Brand about female perspectives in consultancy, building personal networks and how to position yourself in companies that might not share your political views completely. 

Nazima Kadir is an anthropologist with a PhD from Yale  with over 20 years of experience conducting and applying anthropological  research. Her book The Autonomous Life, published by  Manchester University Press, was based on 3.5 years of living and  working in a squatters community in Amsterdam and shortlisted for the  BBC Ethnography award. It was featured on Radio 4 and Wired magazine.

Early in her career, Nazima worked as an investigator of police  misconduct in New York City.  She then earned a Fulbright scholarship,  interviewing Asian domestic workers in Cyprus. After teaching English  language in Uruguay, she went to graduate school. In academia, her  fieldwork and writing were funded by grants and fellowships, including  the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement  Grant. In the private sector, Nazima has been leading insights and  exploratory research capabilities within innovation and design. Projects  range from brand strategy, service design, healthcare innovation, and  new product development. Sectors include Hotels/Hospitality, Online  Retail, Consumer Electronics, Medical Devices, Health/ Wellness, FMCG,  Home Entertainment/Gaming, Automotive, Telecommunications, Employee  Services, and Financial Services. She's worked with clients such as  Marriott, Amazon, Pepsi, LG, P&G, Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi,  Hewlett Packard, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Sodexo, and Ford.

Ralf Brand is a Geographer with a PhD in Community and Regional Planning from the  University of Texas at Austin. He worked as consultant for the  Sustainable Performance Group and advised a number of municipalities on  their Local Agenda 21 processes. As lecturer at Queen's University  Belfast and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester he conducted  research and taught about the “co-evolution” between technical and  social change towards more cohesive, more just and more sustainable  cities. Since 2013 he deploys this approach at Rupprecht Consult in  Cologne, Germany, where he leads the “People-Focused Mobility Solutions”  team. Ralf developed and /or coordinated various projects, mostly  EU-funded applied research projects (e.g. SUMI, SUNRISE, ReVeAL,  INCLUSION) on various aspects of more human- and more  environmentally-friendly mobility systems.

The webinar series 'Urban Work' is organized together with the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies.