Over the past twenty five years I have been one of a small number of scholar-activists pioneering the study of race and culture in contemporary Britain, beginning with the publication of my pamphlet on women and the National Front in 1978. I established an international reputation for research on race and gender in 1992 when my first academic book Beyond the Pale was published. My intervention in feminist theory and practice, in particular my focus on the discursive production of whiteness through a gendered reading of colonial history, was instrumental in shaping a new international field of study which has since become known as Critical Whiteness Studies. In 1998 I received a PhD for this body of work from the University of Cambridge (SPS).

            My current research (2008-) takes my lifelong interest in racism, citizenship, belonging and national identity discourse into an exploration of militarisation and, in particular, the changing position of military institutions in UK society as a result of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have completed a study of racism and diversity in the British Army, exploring the interface between civil and military spheres within the last decade. This was an ethnographic project which took the recruitment of Commonwealth soldiers as an entry point, using interviews and observation as the basis for prizing military organisational culture open for greater public scrutiny.

I am currently engaged in a new project that tracks some of the consequences of war at a time when the armed forces are looking for a role in the UK, post-Afghanistan. One strand of this examines the impact of military institutions on particular places in the UK ('The military in our midst'). Another explores the concept of militarised multiculture inside and outside the military, including the integration of Gurkha communities in southern England and the ongoing attempts to recruit British ethnic minorities.

My ongoing research interests can be summarised as follows:

• race and gender, whiteness, history and politics of antiracism, historical feminism,
• British national identity, ‘Britishness’, race and diversity in the Armed Forces, the soldier-citizen-migrant, militarisation of social life
• Public Diplomacy, intercultural-relations
• Gender relations and feminism in the Muslim-majority world
• geographies of life-writing, landscape, place, social ecology, urban/rural divide, Englishness