For a Reparatory Social Science

Contributor(s): Professor Gurminder K Bhambra | The social sciences are implicated in the reproduction of the very structures of inequality that are ostensibly their objects of concern. This is partly the result of their failure to acknowledge the ‘connected histories’ of one of their primary units of analysis – the modern nation-state, postcolonial scholar Gurminder K. Bhambra will argue.
In the inaugural Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity Keynote Lecture, Professor Bhambra will explore the social sciences’ failure to acknowledge the extent to which modern nation-states were bound up with relations of colonial extraction and domination. Without putting such relations at the heart of our analyses, we cannot address global inequality effectively. Positing colonial histories as central to national imaginaries and the structures through which inequalities are legitimated and reproduced, she will explore a framework for a reparatory social science, oriented to global justice a