Research Focus
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My research agenda asks two questions. First, how do ideas of race exist and work within elite, academic spaces and how do these ideas enter evaluation processes? Second, conceptualizing these academic spaces as places of work, what roles do cultural processes play in challenging, maintaining, and perpetuating racism? I explore how elite individuals define and recognize value during evaluation processes – or, identify merit – and how ideas of race, then, intersect with evaluation and policy decision-making. My work brings cultural analytical tools to study the production of racism and racial knowledge, while engaging critical theoretical approaches to question the emerging role of higher education in contemporary society.
Higher education serves as the empirical case for my work and my approach grounds higher education institutions within their histories of slavery and colonialism and their contemporary sociopolitical context. My scholarly record touches on various dimensions of higher education, such as the role of race-conscious admissions, university-community engagement, and the relationship between the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of race. A copy of my CV is available here for download (as of 03/2020). |
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Racializing Meritocracy: Ideas of Excellence and Exclusion in Faculty Diversity
If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us. – Toni Morrison, “How Can Values Be Taught in This University?” (by way of Giroux)
How would a 22nd century educational social contract between higher education institutions and society define the faculty role? Can a forward-looking social contract accept the faculty role from its 1920s-based definition? Can the professoriate’s persistent demographic homogeneity successfully build knowledge for a 22nd century global society? Racializing Meritocracy: Ideas of Excellence and Exclusion in Faculty Diversity enters this nexus of history, knowledge institutions, and society to explore how those who produce expert knowledge for society obtain their own knowledge and expertise on race. Ongoing controversies in higher education recognize that oppressive histories’ legacies continue to reproduce inequalities because ideas do not exist in social or political vacuums. Instead, these histories persist, in part, by how ideas, as intellectual threads over time, manifest in the social world, especially when ideas connect with racial hierarchies of valuation and worth. While curricular and financial responses have been offered to address these histories’ legacies for students, what of the faculty role and the professoriate’s homogeneity? To understand how knowledge of race circulates among elite knowledge producers, the project conceptualizes universities through their faculty’s work. Faculty are a site at which the relationship between ideas of race and science meet, and contending with histories of racial oppression enables academics to assess the value of their own work, their own intellectual tools, and how their work influences society.
Using a three-tiered organizational research design at four, elite public and private institutions, the project centers faculty ideas and interrogates the nebulous box of merit, which contributes to the professoriate’s demographic homogeneity. Bringing 88 interviews with present-day faculty across the disciplines together with the historical scholarship and theories of race and colonialism, the dissertation contributes to the sociologies of race and education. First, through its analysis of how the terms of merit have shifted within the elite evaluative culture for faculty from 1890 until present, the project identifies the relationship between how race operates structurally to determine what is valuable and how these meanings influenced the university and constructing the faculty role. Second, the dissertation identifies how university identity is tied to this relationship, and how that binding contextually defines merit for the elite university and its faculty. Finally, through this nested organizational design, faculty are placed within their lived, academic context. As a result, the project identifies the racialized faculty subjectivities surrounding the faculty role that filter what faculty deem meritorious for departmental inclusions. Through these contributions, Racializing Meritocracy provides pathways forward for re-imagining an educational social contract but underscores a need to address how elite faculty structure society and knowledge production through their ideas of race and merit. In doing so, the projects aims to expand the field of race and higher education scholarship, by reconsidering education’s role for future societies and imagining a new social contract.
How would a 22nd century educational social contract between higher education institutions and society define the faculty role? Can a forward-looking social contract accept the faculty role from its 1920s-based definition? Can the professoriate’s persistent demographic homogeneity successfully build knowledge for a 22nd century global society? Racializing Meritocracy: Ideas of Excellence and Exclusion in Faculty Diversity enters this nexus of history, knowledge institutions, and society to explore how those who produce expert knowledge for society obtain their own knowledge and expertise on race. Ongoing controversies in higher education recognize that oppressive histories’ legacies continue to reproduce inequalities because ideas do not exist in social or political vacuums. Instead, these histories persist, in part, by how ideas, as intellectual threads over time, manifest in the social world, especially when ideas connect with racial hierarchies of valuation and worth. While curricular and financial responses have been offered to address these histories’ legacies for students, what of the faculty role and the professoriate’s homogeneity? To understand how knowledge of race circulates among elite knowledge producers, the project conceptualizes universities through their faculty’s work. Faculty are a site at which the relationship between ideas of race and science meet, and contending with histories of racial oppression enables academics to assess the value of their own work, their own intellectual tools, and how their work influences society.
Using a three-tiered organizational research design at four, elite public and private institutions, the project centers faculty ideas and interrogates the nebulous box of merit, which contributes to the professoriate’s demographic homogeneity. Bringing 88 interviews with present-day faculty across the disciplines together with the historical scholarship and theories of race and colonialism, the dissertation contributes to the sociologies of race and education. First, through its analysis of how the terms of merit have shifted within the elite evaluative culture for faculty from 1890 until present, the project identifies the relationship between how race operates structurally to determine what is valuable and how these meanings influenced the university and constructing the faculty role. Second, the dissertation identifies how university identity is tied to this relationship, and how that binding contextually defines merit for the elite university and its faculty. Finally, through this nested organizational design, faculty are placed within their lived, academic context. As a result, the project identifies the racialized faculty subjectivities surrounding the faculty role that filter what faculty deem meritorious for departmental inclusions. Through these contributions, Racializing Meritocracy provides pathways forward for re-imagining an educational social contract but underscores a need to address how elite faculty structure society and knowledge production through their ideas of race and merit. In doing so, the projects aims to expand the field of race and higher education scholarship, by reconsidering education’s role for future societies and imagining a new social contract.
PUBLICATIONS
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.
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Garbes, Laura, and Kennedy, Michael D. (2019). Critical Sociology of Knowledge. In Lynette Spillman (Ed), Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh. Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Myopia of Merit Knowledge. Under review. Draft available here on SocArXiv.
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Hirschman, Daniel, and Ellen Berrey. When Colleges Drop Affirmative Action: Trends in Admissions Policies and Student Enrollment at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016. In preparation. Draft available here on SocArXiv.
please feel free to reach out to me if you have difficulty obtaining a copy of publication materials
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.
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Garbes, Laura, and Kennedy, Michael D. (2019). Critical Sociology of Knowledge. In Lynette Spillman (Ed), Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Available here.
kehal, prabhdeep singh. Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Myopia of Merit Knowledge. Under review. Draft available here on SocArXiv.
kehal, prabhdeep singh, Hirschman, Daniel, and Ellen Berrey. When Colleges Drop Affirmative Action: Trends in Admissions Policies and Student Enrollment at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990-2016. In preparation. Draft available here on SocArXiv.
please feel free to reach out to me if you have difficulty obtaining a copy of publication materials
Presentations
2020
"Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Constriction of Merit Knowledge." Manuscript presented at:
2019
“To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions by Amaka Okechukwu.” Author Meets Critic, Association of Black Sociologists, New York, New York, August, 2019.
2018
“Racial Excavation: Racializing Organizations and Organizing Race.” Manuscript presented at Du Boisian Sociology: Critical Insights for Theorizing Race and Ethnicity, American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA, August, 2018.
“The Decline of the Diversity Imperative? Enrollment Trends Among Colleges Voluntarily Abandoning Race-Conscious Admissions.” Manuscript presented at Institutional Change in Higher Education, American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA, August, 2018.
“Excellence, Reflexivity, and Racism: On Sociology's Nuclear Contradiction and Its Abiding Crisis.” Manuscript presented at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University, Providence, RI, April, 2018.
“Fleeting Access: Racialized and Class Exclusion through Higher Education Enrollment Management.” Invited Lecture at Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February, 2018.
2017
"Race and Merit: Racialized Exclusion from Prestige in Higher Education Enrollment, 2004-2013." Paper presented at student workshop series, Brown University Department of Sociology, Providence, RI, October, 2017.
"Something in the Way We Race: Racial Order and Institutional Logics." Manuscript presented at
“Who Gets to Walk the Straight Line? Racial Differences in the Accumulation of Structural Advantage/Disadvantage in Education.” Manuscript presented at Population Association of America, Chicago, IL, April, 2017.
“Minoritized Identity Formation: Students’ Experiences with Diversity and Inclusion.” Presented at Association for Psychological Science, Boston, MA, May, 2017.
“Reclaiming Activist Sikhi: An Excavated Perspective.” Invited Lecture for Speaking of Sikhs Lecture Series, Sikhs of Princeton, Princeton University, March, 2017.
2016
"(Re)Imprinting Race into Organizations: A Theoretical Framing of Racial Imprinting." Manuscript presented at student workshop series, Brown University Department of Sociology, Providence, RI, April, 2016.
2015
“A path to dialogue: Graduate students of color and liberating education”, Gramlich Showcase, University of Michigan, Ford School of Public Policy, March, 2015.
“Educational and social pathways: A Critical Race Theory exploration of California Sikh youth”, Jakara Sikholars, Stanford University Center for South Asia &, Feb, 2015.
2014
“Institutionally stratified degree attainment in Michigan's postsecondary education”, Division of Accountability Services & Educational Services, MI Dept. of Ed, Aug 2014.
"Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Constriction of Merit Knowledge." Manuscript presented at:
- American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 2020.
- American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, April, 2020. [cancelled due to public health concerns]
- Eastern Sociological Society, Philadelphia, PA, February, 2020.
2019
“To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions by Amaka Okechukwu.” Author Meets Critic, Association of Black Sociologists, New York, New York, August, 2019.
2018
“Racial Excavation: Racializing Organizations and Organizing Race.” Manuscript presented at Du Boisian Sociology: Critical Insights for Theorizing Race and Ethnicity, American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA, August, 2018.
“The Decline of the Diversity Imperative? Enrollment Trends Among Colleges Voluntarily Abandoning Race-Conscious Admissions.” Manuscript presented at Institutional Change in Higher Education, American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA, August, 2018.
“Excellence, Reflexivity, and Racism: On Sociology's Nuclear Contradiction and Its Abiding Crisis.” Manuscript presented at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University, Providence, RI, April, 2018.
“Fleeting Access: Racialized and Class Exclusion through Higher Education Enrollment Management.” Invited Lecture at Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February, 2018.
2017
"Race and Merit: Racialized Exclusion from Prestige in Higher Education Enrollment, 2004-2013." Paper presented at student workshop series, Brown University Department of Sociology, Providence, RI, October, 2017.
"Something in the Way We Race: Racial Order and Institutional Logics." Manuscript presented at
- W.E.B. Du Bois and the Color Line in the 21st Century: Continuity, Challenges, and New Directions, Social Theory Forum, Boston, MA, March, 2017.
- Mini-conference on Race and Organizations, Eastern Sociological Society, Philadelphia, PA, February, 2017.
“Who Gets to Walk the Straight Line? Racial Differences in the Accumulation of Structural Advantage/Disadvantage in Education.” Manuscript presented at Population Association of America, Chicago, IL, April, 2017.
“Minoritized Identity Formation: Students’ Experiences with Diversity and Inclusion.” Presented at Association for Psychological Science, Boston, MA, May, 2017.
“Reclaiming Activist Sikhi: An Excavated Perspective.” Invited Lecture for Speaking of Sikhs Lecture Series, Sikhs of Princeton, Princeton University, March, 2017.
2016
"(Re)Imprinting Race into Organizations: A Theoretical Framing of Racial Imprinting." Manuscript presented at student workshop series, Brown University Department of Sociology, Providence, RI, April, 2016.
2015
“A path to dialogue: Graduate students of color and liberating education”, Gramlich Showcase, University of Michigan, Ford School of Public Policy, March, 2015.
“Educational and social pathways: A Critical Race Theory exploration of California Sikh youth”, Jakara Sikholars, Stanford University Center for South Asia &, Feb, 2015.
2014
“Institutionally stratified degree attainment in Michigan's postsecondary education”, Division of Accountability Services & Educational Services, MI Dept. of Ed, Aug 2014.
