Dr Asha Abeyasekera
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

PhD - International Development and Social Anthropology, University of Bath

MA - Women’s Studies, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka

BA - English Literature, Mount Holyoke College, USA

My scholarship focuses on marriage and kinship, the everyday practices of intimacy and care, and the gendered impacts of global capitalism on women’s homemaking in contemporary South Asia.  My research examines: the gendered dimensions of urban poverty and precarity; the materiality and emotional dimensions of intimate relations and domestic violence; and the creative strategies women use to survive, resist, and flourish even as they claim ethical lives.

My fieldwork methods combine ethnography with life-histories and narratives of personal experience.  As a feminist anthropologist, I am specifically interested in how agency is negotiated and subjectivities are formed, especially how aspirations for the ‘modern’ structure women’s emotions, configure their intimate relations, and shape expressions of the self.

Prior to joining the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York in September 2022, I served as the coordinator for the MA in Gender and Women’s Studies at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo (2012-2021).  In 2022, I was an International Fellow of Urban Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London (2022). 

Research

Overview

I am the co-lead researcher on Sri Lanka for an on-going GCRF funded multi-country study “Navigating the grid in the ‘world-class city’: poverty, gender, and access to services in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka’. My research focuses on the lives of women in a working-class neighbourhood in Colombo, and records the ways in which they disproportionately bear the burden of eviction and relocation through their homemaking and care work. The research positions the home as a multi-nodal site where intimacy and belonging, hierarchies of kinship and gender, class and ethnicity, and the repressive power of the state intersect.

I am also the lead researcher for Sri Lanka on a multi-country study on ‘Honour, shame, and, child protection’ conducted in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Uganda, and South Africa. The research is a cross-cultural exploration of the social norms of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’, how it is transmitted inter-generationally, and its impact on young people’s wellbeing.