For a reparatory social science

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

The social sciences are implicated in the reproduction of the very structures of inequality that are also, ostensibly, their objects of concern. This is, in part, a consequence of their failure to acknowledge the ‘connected histories’ from which they abstract one of their primary units of analysis – that is, the modern nation-state. In this talk, I argue for the need to account for colonial histories as central to the construction of the nation and to the social structures through which inequalities are legitimated and reproduced. In the process, I put forward a framework for a reparatory social science, one that is oriented to global justice as a reconstructive project of the present.

Speaker: Professor Gurminder K Bhambra FBA, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex

Gurminder K Bhambra FBA FAcSS is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex. Among her publications are Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, which won the 2008 BSA's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first book, Connected Sociologies and most recently in 2021 the co-authored book Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Her current projects focus on epistemological justice and reparations and on the political economy of race and colonialism. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.