Professor Navtej Purewal

Biography

Navtej Purewal is Professor in the Decolonising Arts Institute at UAL. She has been committed to un-disciplinarity and radical interdisciplinarity across the arts, humanities and social sciences throughout her academic and professional journey, including creative practice and activist thinking and action. Doing decolonial and anticolonial work means to resist business-as-usual approaches and to name the ethical responsibilities which academics and universities are confronted with in these times of majoritarianism, perpetration, and coloniality.

She joined UAL in 2024 from SOAS where she had been Professor of Political Sociology and Development Studies (2019-2024) and Deputy Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute (2014-2019). She was previously a lecturer in Development Studies and then Sociology at the University of Manchester, visiting chair at the School of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney and is currently AHRC India fellow focusing specifically on cultural heritage and the creative industries.