prabhdeep kehal, Ph.D.

SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: APRIL 6, 2022
GRADUATE STUDENT
Ph.D. Brown University
A.M. Brown University
M.A. University of Michigan
M.P.P. University of Michigan
B.A. University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests

Sociology of race and culture (elites); Coloniality of gender and sexuality (LGBTQIA+ Sikhs); Du Boisian Sociology

Biography

Year of Entry: 2015

dr. kehal is a writer, sociologist, and educator. Their research program asks how racism, cisheterosexism, and colonialism are experienced in cultural organizations with respect to implementing equitable cultural change. Empirically, their three projects investigate what distinguishes anti-racist and anti-colonial strategies of inclusion from those of broad cultural inclusion in the United States. In their book project, they explore how these processes of cultural change and demographic inclusion unfold in junior, tenure-track professor hiring in the elite US research professoriate. They argue elite professors practice aristocratic inclusion, or use inclusion initiatives to justify narrowly seeking demographic diversity from among elites and to justify using elite affiliations to narrowly construct hirability. In one ongoing research project, they are creating an oral history archive of LGBTQIA+ Sikhs in collaboration with a community-based organization to understand processes of subjectivity formation in relation to U.S. settler colonialism. They focus on how queer and trans peoples in faith-based, Asian and migrant-descendant communities in the United States make sense of themselves and the politics of minoritized representation in archives. They lead a final project in their postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to explore how the labor of implementing anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the sciences and medicine fields is conceptualized, distributed, and justified. Currently, they serve as a Co-Editor for the Sikh Research Journal and secretary for Sociologists 4 Trans Justice; they are affiliated with the Diversity Scholars Network (University of Michigan) and the Scholar Strategy Network.

dr. kehal's work has been recognized by the Eastern Sociological Society's Charles V. Willie Minority Graduate Student Award, and supported by The Institute for Transformative Practice at Brown University, two two-year fellowships 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. 

Peer-reviewed Manuscripts

  • Carmine Perrotti, prabhdeep singh kehal, Georgina Manok, jesús hernández, and Adam Bush. CAUSing a Commotion: Reflections on Third Space Academic Labor. (Forthcoming). Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor).
  • kehal, prabhdeep singh. Labor and Status in the Color Line of US Higher Education. 2023. Special Review Symposium of Higher Education: Doing the Right Thing (Gasman), Broke (Hamilton and Nielsen), Point of Reckoning (Segal). Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1-7.
  • Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. 2023. Epistemic Wounded Attachments: Recovering Definitional Subjectivity through Colonial Libraries. History and Theory, 62(2): 203-24.
  • 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, 7(4): 543-560.
  • 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.
  • 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, 20(1):50-65.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.