Professor (or Dr). Parminder Bhachu studies the complex movements of people across international borders and interrogates their cultural and technical creativity which makes them particularly adept at navigating uncertainty and fragile worlds.
Many years ago, Bhachu coined the concept of “twice migrants” an all-encompassing conceptual framework which captures the definitive characteristics of multiply migrant groups and their diasporas, all over the world. Culturally dexterous and sophisticated at the management of their minority status, these groups reproduce their durable cultural and technical capital to invigorate the economies they reside in, greatly enhancing their creative capacities and innovative reach. At the same time, these movers and makers are deeply collaborative, supremely generous, and at the heart of open-source sharing, participative pedagogy, and diasporic crowd sourcing to fabricate an inclusive creative commons. They are munificent with their expertise and resources to facilitate collective intelligence, the common good, and the maker movement. Bhachu brings her unique ethnographic insights to illuminate what can be learnt about surviving and thriving in worlds of disequilibrium and flux.
Dr. Bhachu is a multiple-migrant maker who has lived in four continents, East Africa, UK, Asia, and on both sides of the east and west coasts of the United States. She brings her authentically lived experiences of a border-crossing life to her intellectual trajectory, and to decode why people move to unfamiliar sites leaving behind the familial and familiar to make lives in new lands. What are their distinctive qualities that make them amongst the most risk taking and innovative people in the world? What are the forces which contribute to their expansively distributive and contributive ways of being in world, a modus vivendi and operandi that is diametrically opposed to those of the power elite? Bhachu explores these themes in her work with an authentic deeply lived border-crossing biography.
Bhachu is the author of Movers and Makers: Resilience, Uncertainty and Migrant Creativity in Worlds of Flux (2021), Twice Migrants (1985) and Dangerous Designs (2004) and co-editor of both Enterprising Women (1986)and Immigration and Entrepreneurship (1991). She is a Professor of Sociology at Clark University. She has held a Henry R. Luce Professorship in Cultural Identities and Global Processes and has been a Director of Women’s Studies.