Avtar Brah

Avtar Brah is a Ugandan-British sociologist. She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, and a pioneer of diaspora studies.

Life

Avtar Brah was born in the Punjab and grew up in Uganda.^[1] Her mother tongue was Punjabi, and she recalls reading the novelist Nanak Singh, the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah and the contemporary poet Amrita Pritam as a young person. In the late 1960s she studied on a scholarship in the United States before coming to Britain in the early 1970s, where she worked as a researcher at the Ethnic Relations Unit at Bristol University. She was left a stateless refugee in Britain after Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda. She began her PhD in the mid-1970s, researching Asian communities in Southall, and moved to Southall as a community worker when her research contract at Bristol University ended. She participated in a demonstration against the National Front at which hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and was a founding member of the Southall Black Sisters.^[2]

Brah was a research associate at Leicester University from 1980 to 1982, and a lecturer at the Open University from 1982 to 1985, She joined Birkbeck in 1985 as a lecturer, eventually rising to the rank of professor there. She was also visiting professor at the University of California in 1992 and Cornell University in 2001.^[3]

Brah was appointed MBE in 2001, for services to race, gender and ethnic identity issues.^[4]

Works

• Working choices: South Asian young Muslim women and the labour market. 1992.
• Cartographies of Diaspora: contesting identities. London; New York: Routledge, 1996.
• (ed. with Mary J. Hickman and Maírtín Mac an Ghaill) Thinking identities: ethnicity, racism, and culture. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1999..
• Global futures : migration, environment, and globalization. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
• (ed. with Annie E. Coombes) Hybridity and its discontents : politics, science, culture. London: Routledge, 2000.

References

1. Alison Donnell, ed. (2002). "Brah, Avtar". Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. Routledge. p. 56. ISBN 978-1-134-70025-7.
2. Les Beck and Avtar Brah, 'activism, imagination and writing: Avtar Brah reflects on her life and work with Les Back', Feminist Review, No. 100 (2012), oo. 39-51.
3. Avtar Brah – Birkbeck, University of London
4. "No. 56070". The London Gazette (1st supplement). 30 December 2000. p. 15.