the researcher & research program
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I am sociologist of race and colonialism. My research broadly investigates how the history of US segregation and diversity are debated to change cultural boundaries of merit and inclusion in US cultural organizations. Conducting a Du Boisian sociology of the elite, I explore how workers in elite cultural institutions navigate, rationalize, and resist organizational change. Through ethnographic and archival methodologies, along with relevant quantitative methods, I situate developing frameworks of faculty merit and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as part of a historical process of forming ideas about race and expertise within elite US organizations.
I have been supported by The Institute for Transformative Practice at Brown University, a fellowship at the Swearer Center, the Beatrice and Joseph Feinberg Memorial Fund, the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity at Brown University, and the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. My additional research projects have been supported by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America's Humanities Lab and the American Sociological Association's Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline. My ongoing and future research extends investigations into knowledge production, elites, and inequality to consider how universities are sites for maintaining structural racism and colonialism, with a focus on university-neighborhood relations (mutual aid and libraries) and desegregating sociology. My research, in addition to peer-reviewed publications, has produced digital humanities projects (with Dr. Elena Shih), such as AMORStories, which is a digital oral history archive documenting the experiences of Providence organizers and residents who mobilized to create a mutual aid network in the face of the 2020 pandemic and in the absence of robust state support. |
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the dissertation project
In the United States, professors at research universities routinely make hiring decisions about their peers. Racializing Meritocracy: Ideas of Excellence and Exclusion in Faculty Diversity asks, how do elite research professors justify hiring decisions? I consider how professors define and justify their definitions of merit while navigating pressures to change their elite expertise cultures for diversity and equity. Drawing together interview, ethnographic, and secondary historical data across four hyper-elite campuses, I apply a Du Boisian sociological lens to analyze how professors construct boundaries of inclusion for junior, tenure-track scholars. I argue that elite professors define inclusion through five types of cultural fit vis-à-vis “hirable merit” and rely on eliteness in these definitions when prompted to define hirable merit more equitably in hiring decisions.
I identify five justification structures, or forms of justificatory practice, that describe how professors explain how they rely heavily on elite credentials and rationalize these credentials’ purpose. Elite professors perceive hirable candidates as those who are able to perform a desirable type of academic subjectivity in the elite and US research professoriate because they have cultural fit. Between 1860 and 1980, fit could be with segregationist norms of research. Contemporarily, fit could be with academic politics of preservation, elite research networks, gendered academic performances, and cisheteronormative conformity in academic practice. In analyzing these justifications, alongside reflexive ethnographic analyses, I show how professors use justificatory structures to rationalize eliteness as part of hirable merit as one way to produce a racialized meritocracy. While prior studies have identified how cultural fit is used in elite hiring processes, I offer a historicized characterization of fit to identify how the elite US research professoriate is best understood as an academic aristocracy. As an aristocracy, professors can use hirable merit to create a social group based on elite academic affiliations, to privilege candidates who have the desired cultural background, and to justify their position as elite academics. With this analysis I underscore that to desegregate the aristocracy, professors must use hirable merit to construct alternative forms of fit to change how campus cultures reward academic labor and expertise.
Racializing Meritocracy is a four-sited institutional ethnography of the elite professoriate in the tradition of Du Boisian sociology. It draws on analyses from a cultural history archive of the US university that prabhdeep made based on secondary analyses of published Black, Indigenous, and anti-colonial educational histories. The dissertation also supplements its historical sociological analyses with 88 in-depth interviews with current faculty from across the disciplines conducted during ethnographic work at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Duke University, and University of North Carolina. As an institutional ethnography, Racializing Meritocracy joins Black and queer feminist analyses of diversity policies and faculty governance in order to understand how professors' use of merit and status maintains a segregated research professoriate.
I identify five justification structures, or forms of justificatory practice, that describe how professors explain how they rely heavily on elite credentials and rationalize these credentials’ purpose. Elite professors perceive hirable candidates as those who are able to perform a desirable type of academic subjectivity in the elite and US research professoriate because they have cultural fit. Between 1860 and 1980, fit could be with segregationist norms of research. Contemporarily, fit could be with academic politics of preservation, elite research networks, gendered academic performances, and cisheteronormative conformity in academic practice. In analyzing these justifications, alongside reflexive ethnographic analyses, I show how professors use justificatory structures to rationalize eliteness as part of hirable merit as one way to produce a racialized meritocracy. While prior studies have identified how cultural fit is used in elite hiring processes, I offer a historicized characterization of fit to identify how the elite US research professoriate is best understood as an academic aristocracy. As an aristocracy, professors can use hirable merit to create a social group based on elite academic affiliations, to privilege candidates who have the desired cultural background, and to justify their position as elite academics. With this analysis I underscore that to desegregate the aristocracy, professors must use hirable merit to construct alternative forms of fit to change how campus cultures reward academic labor and expertise.
Racializing Meritocracy is a four-sited institutional ethnography of the elite professoriate in the tradition of Du Boisian sociology. It draws on analyses from a cultural history archive of the US university that prabhdeep made based on secondary analyses of published Black, Indigenous, and anti-colonial educational histories. The dissertation also supplements its historical sociological analyses with 88 in-depth interviews with current faculty from across the disciplines conducted during ethnographic work at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Duke University, and University of North Carolina. As an institutional ethnography, Racializing Meritocracy joins Black and queer feminist analyses of diversity policies and faculty governance in order to understand how professors' use of merit and status maintains a segregated research professoriate.
publications
Peer-reviewed
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Hirschman, Daniel, and Ellen Berrey. (2021) When Affirmative Action Disappears: Unexpected Patterns in Student Enrollments at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Available here and pre-print available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Garbes, Laura, and Kennedy, Michael D. (2021). Critical Sociology of Knowledge. In Lynette Spillman (Ed), Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Available here.
Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. (2020). Sikhs as Implicated Subjects in the United States: A Reflective Essay (ਵਿਚਾਰ) on Gurmat-Based Interventions in the Movement for Black Lives. Sikh Research Journal, 5(2):68-86. Available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh and Cadence Willse. (2020). Institutional Type, Organizational Pathways, and Student Engagement: Deepening Student Engagement and the Benefit-Use Paradox in Formal Engagement Spaces. Journal of Community Engagement in Higher Education 12(1):50-65. Available here.
Willse, Cadence, kehal, prabhdeep singh, and Mathew Johnson. (2020). Social Innovation and Civic Engagement: A Critical Praxis for Engagement in Higher Education. In E. Mlyn, and A. M. McBride (Eds.), The Civic Mission of Higher Education: Connecting Social Innovation and Civic Engagement. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Available here.
Under review
prabhdeep singh kehal. Negotiating Utopia: A Framework for Researcher Subjectivity Formation Through Entangled Trans Subjectivities.
Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. Epistemic Wounded Attachments: Recovering Definitional Subjectivity through Colonial Libraries.
Reviewed Public Sociology
kehal, prabhdeep singh, and Michael D. Kennedy. 2020. Graduate Education and Academic Labor for Graduate Students during the Pandemic. ASA Footnotes, 12. Available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh. 2018. “Hitting the Wall: It’s Unfair to Expect Graduate Students to Shoulder All the Diversity Work.” Conditionally Accepted, Inside Higher Ed. Available here.
Kennedy, Michael, kehal, prabhdeep singh, and Laura Garbes. 2018. Excellence, reflexivity, and racism: On sociology’s nuclear contradiction and its abiding crisis. History, Theory and Sociology in an Age of Crisis, Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Available here.
please feel free to reach out to me if you have difficulty obtaining a copy of publication materials
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Hirschman, Daniel, and Ellen Berrey. (2021) When Affirmative Action Disappears: Unexpected Patterns in Student Enrollments at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Available here and pre-print available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Garbes, Laura, and Kennedy, Michael D. (2021). Critical Sociology of Knowledge. In Lynette Spillman (Ed), Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Available here.
Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. (2020). Sikhs as Implicated Subjects in the United States: A Reflective Essay (ਵਿਚਾਰ) on Gurmat-Based Interventions in the Movement for Black Lives. Sikh Research Journal, 5(2):68-86. Available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh and Cadence Willse. (2020). Institutional Type, Organizational Pathways, and Student Engagement: Deepening Student Engagement and the Benefit-Use Paradox in Formal Engagement Spaces. Journal of Community Engagement in Higher Education 12(1):50-65. Available here.
Willse, Cadence, kehal, prabhdeep singh, and Mathew Johnson. (2020). Social Innovation and Civic Engagement: A Critical Praxis for Engagement in Higher Education. In E. Mlyn, and A. M. McBride (Eds.), The Civic Mission of Higher Education: Connecting Social Innovation and Civic Engagement. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Available here.
Under review
prabhdeep singh kehal. Negotiating Utopia: A Framework for Researcher Subjectivity Formation Through Entangled Trans Subjectivities.
Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. Epistemic Wounded Attachments: Recovering Definitional Subjectivity through Colonial Libraries.
Reviewed Public Sociology
kehal, prabhdeep singh, and Michael D. Kennedy. 2020. Graduate Education and Academic Labor for Graduate Students during the Pandemic. ASA Footnotes, 12. Available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh. 2018. “Hitting the Wall: It’s Unfair to Expect Graduate Students to Shoulder All the Diversity Work.” Conditionally Accepted, Inside Higher Ed. Available here.
Kennedy, Michael, kehal, prabhdeep singh, and Laura Garbes. 2018. Excellence, reflexivity, and racism: On sociology’s nuclear contradiction and its abiding crisis. History, Theory and Sociology in an Age of Crisis, Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Available here.
please feel free to reach out to me if you have difficulty obtaining a copy of publication materials
