Women Claim Home: Gendered Dimensions of Urban Regeneration, Forced Displacement, and Activism in Cambodia and Sri Lanka

The session will feature the short documentary film – BEING HERE: Stories of Home – based on Asha Abeyasekera’s research in Sri Lanka followed by a discussion on Joshi’s research on the gendered dimensions of dispossession, activism and claim-making among rural citizens dispossessed of their homes and agricultural lands in Cambodia.

Asha L. Abeyasekera is a Lecturer at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. She obtained her PhD in International Development and Social Anthropology from the University of Bath.  Her research interests include intimate relations and women’s subjectivities; ethical self-making; women’s care work and the gendered labour of homemaking; and cross-cultural expressions of emotions and wellbeing.  She is the author of Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka (2021, Rutgers).

Saba Joshi is a Lecturer in Gender and Development, at the Department of Politics at the University of York. Her research focuses on gender in international relations, social movements, land politics and agrarian change, with a geographical focus on South and Southeast Asia. Her PhD thesis obtained from the Graduate Institute, Geneva examined the politics of large-scale land acquisitions in contemporary Cambodia, drawing on 16 months of field research carried across five rural provinces. Her research has been published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Globalizations and the International Journal of Feminist Politics (recipient of 2020 Enloe Award- best article by an early career scholar).