Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta

Research

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta is University Full Professor in Education with a multidisciplinary background. She established the research environment CCD (Communication, Culture, Diversity) at Örebro University, Sweden in the mid-1990s and has been its scientific leader up until 2023. Her research is marked by an explicit multidisciplinary/multi-thematic perspective that has a strong international anchoring. Her research focuses on multiple themes that, at an overarching level, contribute to areas such as communication/languaging, identity positionalities, culture, digitalizatoin and learning from (n)ethnographic approaches at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels from sociocultural and decolonial theories.

Bagga-Gupta is particularly interested in the life-worlds of children, young people and adults, especially with regards to how identity and language emerge, transform and get negotiated in and across different contexts and practices within working-life and institutional settings like schools and higher education. Her interests also include problematizing the “boundaries” that are created through scientific conceptualizations, and where she is interested in “complexifying” scientific analysis through intersectional approaches.

She is strongly committed as a teacher and leader at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels within different multidisciplinary areas and has successfully supervised over 15 doctoral students and over 10 inter/national post-doc candidates. Bagga-Gupta has an extensive international publishing track-record and she has been the editor of seven international peer-reviewed special issues and volumes. She has succcessfully complted editing the 37-chapter volume, The Palgrave Handbook of Decolonizing the Educational and Language Sciences (Springer Nature) that will be available Open Access in the spring of 2025. 

Bagga-Gupta has been project leader for a number of large-scale research projects financed by, among others, the Swedish Research Council and has been the director for two large scale national research schools, among others, the Swedish Research Council financed research school LIMCUL (Literacies, Multilingualism and Cultural practices in present day societies). She successfully led and completed the national Swedish Research Council project PAL, Participation of all? (2017-2023). She is and has also been a board member of four large scale research schools in Sweden. 

International cooperation is an area that Bagga-Gupta considers as being completely necessary for the establishment of a diversity also within science and research. She is, during 2024-2027, visiting professor at two international institutions of research: (i) the SeDyL National Research Center (CNRS-IRD-INALCO), Paris, France, and (ii) the MANUU National University, Hyderabad, India. She is a member of many different international research organizations and has and continues to conduct numerous studies together with both international colleagues and institutions. International cooperation within the scientific community also takes place, not least within the educational sector, since she is regularly invited to hold keynotes and workshops, often with problematizations of scientific activity as a theme. In addition, Bagga-Gupta has organized many academic writing and publishing series for international faculty with a strong sustainable ethical lens. 

Her international assignments also include the regular evaluations she does for the European Research Council and national research councils in Norway, the Netherlands, Latvia, Greece and New Zealand.

Nationally, Bagga-Gupta also seeks to use her research in collaboration with societal sectors outside academia. She established in 2016 and leads since then, for instance, together with representatives for the National Touring Theater (Riksteater) and Örebro Museum, the cross-sectorial think-tank DoIT (Participation and Inclusion think-tank), whose agenda is to draw attention to and illuminate democratic perspectives that various sectors are bearers of. 

Bagga-Gupta is multilingual in oral, written and signed languages. She has received numerous awards within academia for her exceptional work, including as an outstanding university professor. 

Biography

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta completed her doctoral studies at the multidisciplinary thematic institution of Communication Studies at Linköping University, Sweden, in 1995. She conducted her post-doctoral studies primarily at Gallaudet University, Washington DC, USA during 2001-2002. She has two Masters degrees one from India and one from England. 

She established the research environment CCD (Communication, Culture and Diversity) during the 1990s when she received support and the Wallenberg award for young post-doctoral future women leaders. She has been the scientific leader for CCD for over a quarter of a century (up until 2023) and under her leadership the environment has been ranked as one of the five strongest in two separate external evaluations of all research at Örebro University. 

Bagga-Gupta has been university professor during 2007-2016 at Örebro University (Departments of Education and Gender Studies at the Institution for Humanities, Educational and Social Sciences). Her in-depth scientific breadth is also demonstrated by her position during 2011-2015 as research leader at the Rehabilitation Research Center (HFC), Örebro Region and visiting professor of Language Sciences at AMU, Aligarh Muslim University in north India (2015-2018). In addition, she has had appointments as visiting professor in Europe and other parts of India, most recently as Eurodite Scholar-in-residence in Kerala, south India. 

Bagga-Gupta was, during 2007-2012, a board member of the Educational Sciences Committee (UVK) of the Swedish Research Council. She has had a number of appointments as evaluator and expert reviewer for the EU, including the European Research Council and the research councils of different European counties and New Zealand. She has been an editorial board member of international scientific journals and has regularly evaluated both assistant-, associate- and full-professor positions in Nordic settings and doctoral thesis nationally and internationally. 

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta is active in a number of international and national academic organizations and is in addition a founding member of, among other bodies, the global SMDC, Southern Multilingualisms and Diversity Consortium, and SPARC, the Swedish Participatory Action Research Consortium.

Nationally she has, during her tenure at Örebro University, been the director of two large national research schools, LIMCUL (Literacies, Multilingualism and Cultural Practices) and UVD (Educational Sciences with a focus on Didactics).

Bagga-Gupta was headhunted to the position of university professor at the School of Education and Communication (HLK), Jönköping University, Sweden, in 2016. Her initial assignment at HLK included the formation and management of a new research environment LPS, Learning Practices inside and outside Schools. She was the director of LPS between 2017-2021. Her second (initial and continuing) assignment was the establishment and leading of the cross-faculty associate-professor course at Jönköping Universitet. 

Post-doctoral awards/positions 

2012-2014: Fellowship Outstanding Senior Researcher Örebro University, Sweden

2001-2002: Powrie V. Doctor. Chair in Deaf Studies, Gallaudet University, Washington DC, USA

1996-1998: Wallenberg Foundation Fellowship for young post-doctoral women researchers in Sweden