Dr Utsa Mukherjee
Senior Lecturer in Education

Summary

I am a Senior Lecturer in Education at Brunel University London. I am also the Director of Equality and Diversity in the Department. Prior to joining Brunel, I held various academic positions at University of Southampton, Birkbeck University of London and University of Roehampton. 

My research spans the disciplines of Sociology and Social Geography, with inter-connected research interests in the study of childhood and youth, social inequality, leisure and migration. My work across these thematic areas is guided by a commitment to social justice. I am interested in exploring and theorising the way social inequalities are reproduced across time and place, and the way structural inequalities mediate the lived experiences of minoritized subjects (such as racialised minority children in the UK and sexual minority youth in India).

My first monograph Race, Class, Parenting and Children’s Leisure (Bristol University Press, 2023) was the runner-up of the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2024. My solo-edited volume Childhoods & Leisure was published in 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan. My next edited volume Debating Childhood Masculinities is due to come out in September 2024 from Emerald. 

I am the Associate Editor of two peer-reviewed international journals: Journal of Family Studies and Schole: A Journal for Recreation & Leisure Studies Education. I am also the Book Review editor of Sociological Forum and Children & Society. I am an editorial board member of the following peer-reviewed journals: 

• British Journal of Sociology
• British Journal of Sociology of Education
• Sociology Compass
• Children & Society
• Sociological Forum
• Leisure Studies
• World Leisure Journal

I am a Trustee of Academy of Social Sciences (the UK's national academy of academics, practitioners and learned societies in social science). I sit on the executive committee of Leisure Studies Association and I am currently an executive committee member cum Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Officer of the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers). Within Brunel, I am a member of the Education, Identities and Society (EIS) research group within the Department of Education as well of the pan-university Centre for Global Lives and Centre for Health and Wellbeing Across the Lifecourse (CHWL).

Qualifications

PhD Sociology (Royal Holloway, University of London)

BA English (Major) with Sociology and History (Presidency University Kolkata, India)

Responsibility

Director of Equality & Diversity, Department of Education

Member, Brunel Anti-Racism Steering Group