Parallel Lives Conference: Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy on 'Race Politics and the retreat from rationality. In the age of 'evidence based policy development' why would our leaders choose to set the evidence base on Parallel Lives aside?' Paul Gilroy is the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory. His intellectual background is multi-disciplinary and he has extensive interests in literature, art, music and cultural history as well as in social science. He is best known for his work on racism, nationalism and ethnicity and his original approach to the history of the African diaspora into the western hemisphere. Gilroy received his Ph. D. from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University where he was part of the group which collectively produced “The Empire Strikes Back” (Routledge, 1982). After that, he worked at the GLC for a number of years before taking up academic positions at South Bank and Essex where one of his principal responsibilities was teaching on the joint degree in Sociology and Literature. Gilroy moved to Goldsmiths College in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies there in 1995. Before joining the LSE in the summer of 2005, he taught at Yale University where he was Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of Sociology and African American studies as well as chair of the African American Studies department. Gilroy’s current research projects are (1) A study of the moral economy of blackness in the twentieth century which is centrally concerned with the relationship between freedom, automobility and citizenship. (2) A volume on the social and technological dynamics of popular music. (3) A comparative and historical consideration of colonial government. Apart from these book-length studies, work on the politics of race, culture and multiculture in Britain is a constant element in his output. Gilroy has worked, among other things, as a guest curator at the Tate Gallery and the House of World Cultures in Berlin. He has lectured in universities all over the world. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish and German. Paul Gilroy addressed the "Challenging the Parallel Lives Myth: Race, Sociology, Statistics and Politics" conference held at the London School of Economics on May 13th 2009. The conference was co-orgamised by the British Sociological Association Race and Ethnicity Study Group and the British Society for Population Studies.