Bandana Purkayastha

Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology

About

Bandana Purkayastha is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in Sociology at the University of Connecticut, is an internationally recognized researcher, mentor, and leader in the field of sociology, with expertise in substantive human rights, gender, intersectionality and migration and migrants. She serves as Vice President of National Associations at the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the 2023-2027 term.

Research

My CV records my diverse research which appear in over a hundred books, peer-reviewed articles, and chapters in scholarly collections. A few themes have endured over 25 years. My earliest work focused on gendered and intersectional inequalities, and on migrants, transnationalism and the complicated questions about intersectionality across countries. I also explored questions of substantive human rights, violence and peace. Running through these strands of research are my methodological and theoretical forays to erode knowledge hierarchies.

Focusing on migrants, my first book Negotiating Ethnicity was on the experiences of second-generation South Asian Americans’ as a lens for understanding intersectionality and transnationalism, in the pre-Facebook era. I wanted to specifically understand the complicated questions about economic privilege and gendered racialization in one country, minoritization based on religious affiliation across countries, as well as valid methods for documenting simultaneous majority and minority statuses. I have continued this strand of research as explosive growth of social media and the reality of digital lives have complicated questions about hierarchies in societies. A recent peer-reviewed paper on the racial location of South Asians in the US, with Prema Kurien was awarded the 2026 research paper award by the Association for Asian American Studies. Overall, my work on migration and migrants span the continuum of highly skilled international and internal migrants and those who are forced to move, including trafficked persons. A recent example of the former is “Hidden in Plain Sight: Neutral Enclosures for High-Skilled Immigrants during COVID-19,” which was the most read paper in Sociological Forum in 2023. The papers on trafficking, and the book Human Trafficking: Trade for Sex, Labor and Organs, with Farhan Naveed Yousaf are examples of the research on the latter group.

While I am not a religion scholar, colleagues Anjana Narayan and Rianka Roy and I have been exploring how religion is used to serve racist and ultra nationalist causes; much of this work focuses on living religions and religio-nationalist discourses. We are currently tracing how incessant and invasive social media messaging has been shaping migrants and post-migrant generations’ lives. We have been supported by some small grants to produce publicly available material, including podcasts on these projects 2024. During the pandemic, I worked, with historians, economists, geographers and sociologists in India and the US, on the efficacy of methods during crises; some of those insights are being translated into the current work on effective methods to study digital social worlds.

A second emphasis of my work is on substantive human rights, which resulted in an earlier co-edited book (with William Armaline and Davota Silfen Glasberg) on human rights in the U.S.; it was awarded the Gordon Hirabayashi book award in 2013 by the Human Rights section of American Sociological Association (ASA). This focus on substantive human rights intersects with my work on migrants. A special issue of Current Sociology Migration, Migrants, and Human Security outlined the migrant-centric substantive human rights approach. I continue this strand of work with more recent publications on humanitarianism, social justice, and human rights, and the draconian structures being set up across the world to “manage” migrants and trafficked people, and reduce their access to legal channels of redress. A much-read paper, based on an earlier keynote is the open access paper on Suffrage to Substantive Human Rights: The unfinished journey for racial minority women.

I was shaped by a vast corpus of written and oral “anti-colonial” and “decolonial” knowledge streams in Bengali and English on the Indian subcontinent. Consequently, I am acutely aware of the knowledge that does not enter typically enter discussions on social science theories, and I continue to work to dismantle these knowledge hierarchies. My passionate commitment to a more inclusive, respectful knowledge arena is reflected in what I have published, who I cite, and my commitment to learning from and amplifying the work of colleagues across the world. As part of this commitment, in my International Sociological Association’s Vice Presidential project for National Associations, I initiated the podcast series, Sociology In…, designed as an easily accessible resource base to advance knowledge-sharing and understanding among sociologists worldwide.

I am currently working on two edited collections, including one on Sociologists and Sociologies fostering social change with scholars from Asian countries, and two other books. I have been in leading-edge conversations on resilience as a sociological concept for our turbulent world. The recent conference I arranged at FLAME University, Pune India, for the Heads of national associations of sociology from multiple countries had resilience as a theme. (The Sociologist, May 2026 issue, describes this conference). In addition, I am completing a working paper on Connecticut migrants, some publications on water, inequalities and rights, and the transformation of informal street corner gathering spaces in tea-stalls to corporatized cafes. Working with Dr Rianka Roy and Dr. Anjana Narayan, I am also wading into the challenge of finding effective methods for handling huge social media datasets for other forthcoming projects.
I have received many local and national awards including ASA’s 2019 Jessie Bernard Award “in recognition of scholarly work, inclusive of research teaching, mentoring and service, that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.” Other awards are listed on my CV.

Teaching and Mentoring

It has been a great privilege to work with a variety of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as post doctoral researchers from different countries.  I have been recognized for teaching and mentoring throughout my career, including the Sociology graduate students’ Best Mentor award three times (a record), the AAUP and the Connecticut State legislature recognition for teaching promise (2001), the UConn Alumni teaching excellence award (2010), the ASA-Asia and Asian American Section’s teaching excellence award (2009), and, Sociologists for Women in Society’s 2018 Mentoring award.

Leadership and Service

Headshot for Bandana Purkayastha
Contact Information
Emailbandana.purkayastha@uconn.edu
Phone860 486-3791
Curriculum Vitae bandana-purkayastha-cv-june-26.
Office Location218 Manchester Hall