NCID-2169
prabhdeep kehal
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Education/Degree:
1 Sociology (Brown University)
About
dr. kehal is a writer, sociologist, and educator. Their research asks how racism, transmisogyny, and colonialism are experienced in cultural organizations with respect to equitable cultural change. Empirically, they investigate what distinguishes anti-racist and anti-colonial strategies of inclusion from those of broad cultural inclusion in the United States. In their current book project, they explore how these processes of cultural change and demographic inclusion unfold in historic and contemporary debates on defining "hireability" for junior, tenure-track professors in the elite US research professoriate. In future research, they focus on the how queer and trans peoples in faith-based, Asian and migrant-descendant communities in the United States make sense of themselves in relation to U.S. settler colonialism and minoritarian representation in archives.
Current Work
What do people do when they are called to engage in societal transformation through inclusion in our workplaces and in themselves, especially when this is in response to historic inequality? Society is being made and re-made by the daily decisions people make and dr. kehal takes these "mundane instances" of living as important places for researching the limits and possibilities of societal transformation. They seek to understand 1) how people understand historic inequalities and their role in responding to ending such inequalities and 2) how people understand themselves in relation to their own experiences with gender, sexuality, and colonialism in the United States. dr. kehal current research asks these questions in the U.S. research professoriate, while their future research brings this attention to faith-based, migrant-descendant communities (e.g., Sikhs). While these are different empirical areas, what unifies dr. kehal's research is the focus on understanding how power and inclusion operate from "above" and "below", and how mundane actions can reveal the possibility of societal change in the United States.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Du Boisian Sociology, Organizational cultures, Elite cultures, Settler Colonialism, LGBTQIA+ Sikhs