BA (Sussex), MA (LSE), DPhil (Sussex)
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R2.25, Ramphal Building
g.k.bhambra@warwick.ac.uk
www.warwick.ac.uk/go/gkbhambra
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Gurminder is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick. She has held Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at the University of Sussex funded by the ESRC and the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, which were followed by a first appointment at the University of Keele. She has been a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Centre at Mount Holyoke College, USA, where she was also Visiting Assistant Professor in Critical Social Thought.
Research Interests
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Gurminder's research addresses how, within sociological understandings of modernity, the experiences and claims of non-European ‘others’ have been rendered invisible to the dominant narratives and analytical frameworks of sociology. In challenging the dominant, Eurocentred accounts of the emergence and development of modernity, she has put forward an argument for the recognition of ‘connected histories’ in the reconstruction of historical sociology at a global level. While her research interests are primarily in the area of postcolonial historical sociology, she is also interested in the intersection of the social sciences more generally with recent work in postcolonial studies.
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In more recent work, Gurminder addresses arguments concerning the establishment of ‘global sociology’. This involves engagement not just with the changing conceptual architecture (as Saskia Sassen calls it) of globalisation, but also with recognition of the epistemological value and agency of the world beyond the west (as Leela Gandhi has argued). Gurminder suggests that it is only by acknowledging the significance of the 'colonial global' in the constitution of sociology historically, that it is possible to understand and address the postcolonial (and decolonial) present of a ‘global sociology’.
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A third, related, strand of her research engages with the African American tradition in US sociology. The rarity with which scholars such as WEB Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or other ‘African American Pioneers of Sociology’ (as Saint-Arnaud calls them) are presented as core sociological voices within university curricula is a matter of great significance from the point of view of histories of our discipline. However, it is not simply an issue of the presence of African American sociologists, but how mainstream sociological concepts have been structured in the absence of an address of African American sociology and its different interpretation of canonical themes
Research Activities
- Director of the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick
- Convenor of the British Sociological Association Theory Study Group
- Series Co-editor of 'Theory for a Global Age' published by Bloomsbury Academic
For further details of my research activities, click here.
Key Publications
- Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination
(Palgrave, 2007, 2009 paperback edition, winner of the 2008 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first book in Sociology)
- 2007 ‘Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another “Missing” Revolution?’, Sociology Special Issue: ‘Sociology and its Public Face(s)’ 41(5): 871-84.
http://soc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/5/871
- 2010 'Identity Politics and the Need for a “Tomorrow”,’ Economic and Political Weekly 45 (15): 59-66
http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/14641.pdf
For further details of my publications, click here.
Doctoral Supervision
Gurminder welcomes applications for doctoral supervision in her areas of expertise.
Current students supervised:
- Lucy Mayblin 'Historical Institutional Orders and the Development of British Asylum Policy'
- Marcos Estrada ‘Border Crossing: Paraguay and Brazil’
- Carl Mallett ‘Colonial Racial Orders and the Welfare State’
- Tom George 'Neoliberalism and Higher Education'
Past students supervised:
- Rodrigo Cordero Vega 'Diremptions of the social: The ideas of crisis and critique in contemporary social theory'
Passed October 2011
Current Teaching
