Over the past25 years Ware has been one of a small number of scholar-activists pioneering the study of race and culture in contemporary Britain, beginning with the publication of a pamphlet on women and the National Front in 1978. In 1987, Ware co-founded the Women’s Design Service with Sue Cavanagh and Wendy Davis. The organization believed that cities needed to be radically altered to suit women’s needs. The group put out a publication to create women’s bathroom facilities to better suit women’s needs like diaper changing areas and improved sanitary waste facilities. She established an international reputation for research on anti-racism and feminism in 1992 when her first academic book, Beyond the Pale, was published. Her intervention in feminist theory and practice, in particular her focus on the discursive production of whiteness through a gendered reading of colonial history, was instrumental in shaping a new international field of study that has since become known as Critical Whiteness studies. Who Cares About Britishness? A global view of the national identity debate was commissioned by the British Council as a contribution to domestic debates about citizenship, belonging and national identity in the UK. The work explores the practice of intercultural dialogue by engaging with young people living in a variety of postcolonial contexts, from Dublin to Dhaka. She is married to the British academic Paul Gilroy.
Current research
Ware was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Socio-Cultural Change, and the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University until 2014 when she became professor of sociology at Kingston University. In 2008, she began a new project looking at Britishness and militarization in the UK, using the recruitment and employment of Commonwealth soldiers as an entry point. Examining how the figure of the British soldier has acquired a prominence in mainstream culture not seen for many decades, her research focuses on questions of racism and citizenship, militarism and cultural diversity. The book Military Migrants argues that the degree to which the armed forces are seen to have become modernised is central to the management of modern warfare on the domestic front. Maintaining a multi-faith and culturally diverse army has been recognised as a valuable military tool in Afghanistan too. She has a 2018–19 Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
