Prof Shirley Anne Tate
Honorary Professor

Shirley Anne Tate is Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminism and Intersectionality in the Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, and an Honorary Professor in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. Previously, she was Professor of Race and Education, the first appointment of its kind in the UK, and founding Director of the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality at Leeds Beckett University. As a Cultural Sociologist, she is a qualitative researcher interested in intersectional thinking. In her writing, research and teaching she draws on Black feminist, gender, critical ‘race’, queer, and Caribbean decolonial theory within her overall focus on Black Atlantic diaspora studies and emerging identifications.

Shirley's research interests include the body, ‘mixed race’, domestic and care work, beauty, Black intersectional identifications, migration, positive and negative affect, the culture of Britishness, food, ‘race’ performativity, decoloniality, transracial intimacies, skin bleaching/lightening/toning and the politics of skin. She has for some time been developing an area of work on racism's affects within the micro-practices of institutional racism which has an academic and practitioner/activist audience in South Africa, The USA, Brazil and the UK. Her 2015 book on decolonising skin bleaching in Black Atlantic zones has had a wide academic interest within the UK and South Africa. Her recent publications include her 2019 book on decolonizing sambo (Emerald), and the chapters 'Anger, psychic institutional pain and silencing in academia' in Scholarly Engagement and Decolonization: Views from South Africa, The Netherlands and the United States (African Sun Press), ‘The student of color attainment gap in higher education and the institutional culture of equality, diversity and inclusion’ in Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education (Springer), and 'Love for the dead: sambo and the libidinal economy of “post-race” conviviality' in Rethinking the Past for a New Conviviality: Opposing Colonialism, Anti-Semitism, Turbo-Nationalism (Cambridge Scholars Press).

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