Avtar brah biography of williams

Ugandan-British sociologist

Avtar Brah is a Ugandan-British sociologist.

She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, and a pioneer of diaspora studies.

Brah: I was born in Panjab and went to Uganda at the age of about six.

Avtar Brah teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.

The following draws out a few points that suggest an inner coherence in the midst of the rich diversity of questions Avtar Brah addresses.

In Decolonial Imaginings, Avtar Brah offers a transdisciplinary study of the ways in which mobilities assume social forms and result in multiple belongings.

Cartographies of Diaspora throws new light on discussions about 'difference', and 'diversity', informed by feminism and post-structuralism.

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 wh