Whiteness Over the past twenty five years I have studied questions of race and culture in contemporary Britain, both as a journalist and an academic. I worked with Searchlight anti-fascist journal from 1977-1983, and my pamphlet on women and the National Front was published in 1978. My first academic book Beyond the Pale: white women, racism and history investigated the power and allure of whiteness as a racial category, arguing for a gendered reading of colonial history to make sense of contemporary racisms. This intervention, addressed to feminist debates about race and gender, was instrumental in the growth of a new international field of study which has since become known as Critical Whiteness Studies. A second book, Out of Whiteness: color, politics and culture, written with Les Back, took issue with the conservatism inherent in much of this work, and continued to explore our respective obsessions with the cultural politics of anti-racism. This book also considered some epistemological problems inherent in researching racism, as well as arguing for a broader, transnational dialogue about white supremacy that looks beyond US-dominated tropes of racialisation. National Identity: Britishness/Englishness My most recent book, Who Cares About Britishness? A global view of the national identity debate (Arcadia, 2007), was commissioned by Counterpoint, the British Council’s cultural relations think tank. The research drew on conversations with young people in South Asia, East Africa, Ireland and the UK, exploring questions of belonging, exclusion, historical memory, transnational identity and citizenship in different national and urban contexts. Issues of whiteness and national identity are also relevant to my research on the English village as a site of globalisation. Over the past decade I have been engaged in a study of a village in Hampshire, looking at various indices of socio-cultural change and attempting to compile a different kind of story about social change in rural England. My research interests can be summarised as follows: race and gender, whiteness, history and politics of antiracism, British/English national identity, Islamophobia, transnational feminism, feminism in the Muslim-majority world communicative citizenship, intercultural dialogue, cultural diplomacy life-writing, landscape, place, social ecology, urban/rural divide, heritage