Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

Introduction

Professor Suruchi Thapar-Björkert is a Docent and Professor at the Department of Government, University of Uppsala, Sweden. She joined the Department in 2010.

After completing her Bachelors (University of Delhi), Masters (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), and Master of Philosophy (Cambridge University, UK), degrees, Professor Thapar-Björkert completed her PhD at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick in 1997. She held teaching and research positions at the Development Studies and Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science and Department of Sociology, University of Warwick before joining the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol as tenured faculty in 2010.

Professor Thapar-Björkert’s research trajectories cover the following areas: gendered discourses of colonialism and nationalism, gendered violence in India and Europe, ethnicity, social capital and social exclusion, assisted reproductive technologies and qualitative feminist research methodologies. Her first book Women in the Indian Nationalist Movement: Unseen Faces: Unheard Voices, 1925-1942 (2006) was reprinted in 2015 as a Sage Classic. She co-edited the book, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice with Routledge, UK (2021).

Professor Thapar-Björkert is recipient of many research awards including university research award (Kraftpaket för Jämställdhet) at Uppsala University in 2012. She has completed four Swedish Research Council funded projects on Civil Society and Deliberative Democracy (2015-2017), The Paradoxes of Empowerment – Employment Guarantee, Women and Dalits in India (2016-2019), From Waste to Profit: Gender, Bio-politics, and Neo-liberalism in Indian Commercial Surrogacy (2017-2020) and Understanding Racism in Healthcare: Developing and implementing anti-racist strategies through shared knowledge production and evaluation (2018-2021). This research has been published in leading journals such as such as Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Sociological Review, Sociology, Journal of Gender Studies, Development in Practice, Development and Change, Contemporary South Asia, Women’s History Review, International Journal of Social Research Methodology and World Development.

Areas of Interest and Expertise

• Gender, Colonialism and Nationalism in India and Ireland
• Social Exclusion and Social Capital
• Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Labour in India, Uganda and South Africa
• Racism in Healthcare
• Social Protection Schemes and caste politics in India
• Feminist Research Methodologies