Vasana Kaushalya

Profile

Thesis supervisors

• Dr Carolyn Hunter
• Dr Lynne Baxter

Research topic

Sensory experiences and power relations in physical and digital body work service encounters.

Research interests

• Organising in the digital economy
• Body work and body labour
• Gender
• Space and time
• Power relations at work

Biography

Vasana completed her BSc Business Administration (Special) Degree with a First Class at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka (2011). She holds a Master of Business Administration (Merit Pass) from the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM), University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka (2016). Vasana has worked as a production team member at a UK based software development and data processing company in Sri Lanka. She joined the Department of Business Administration, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, in 2012 as a tutor, and currently she is serving the same department as a lecturer.

Vasana's PhD thesis focuses on multi-sensory, physical, and digital body labour service encounters. It addresses how the processes involved in body labour bring together human and non-human bodies. While reading for her PhD, she has also been working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for a First Year Module of the School for Business and Society and for the ‘Research Design’ module offered to postgraduate students of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of York.

Publications

• Kaushalya, V and Kodikara, P (2022). ‘It is not just ‘a page’ — Women’s solidarity expressed on digital platforms and its contribution towards the ecosystem’, in the stream ‘Women in the changing landscape of work’, Gender, Work & Organization (GWO) – The 12th International Interdisciplinary Conference, Bogotá, Colombia (June 22-24, 2022).
• Kaushalya, V and Kodikara, P (2021). ‘Motherhood, language and othering at organisational meetings – A study on experiences of single and childless/child free men and women at workplace’, in the stream ‘Organising Childhood: Growing Up and Looking Back’, Gender, Work & Organization (GWO) – The 11th International Interdisciplinary Conference, Canterbury, UK (June 30-July 02, 2021).
• Kaushalya, V and Ramanayake, U.B. (2019). ‘An alternative to the dominant narrative of academic career success: A case study on how gender identity matters in defining women’s career success in Sri Lankan academia’, in the stream ‘Academic failure: Challenging how academic career success is understood, and imagining alternatives’, The 11th Critical Management Studies Conference, Milton Keynes, UK (June 27-29, 2019).
• Kodikara, P and Kaushalya, V (2019) ‘The (Im)Possibility of pluriversal understandings of ‘Development’: A narrative from Global South’, in the stream ‘Dispossessed presents, open futures: Deconstructing narratives of developmentalism and modernization’, The 11th Critical Management Studies Conference, Milton Keynes, UK (June 27-29, 2019).
• Kodikara, P and Kaushalya, V (2019) ‘CMS managership — Is it the beginning of the end of CMS?’, in the stream ‘When critical management scholars become managers’, The 11th Critical Management Studies Conference, Milton Keynes, UK (June 27-29, 2019).
• Bandara, H and Kaushalya, V (2019) ‘Mobile Information Technology Devices (MITDs) as creative capitalist tools of place making: A narrative of blurred spatial-temporal arrangement of work in the Sri Lankan apparel industry’, in the stream ‘Flexible working arrangements – boundary work or boundless work?’, The 11th Critical Management Studies Conference, Milton Keynes, UK (June 27-29, 2019).