Asha Abeyasekera

Dr Asha Abeyasekera has a PhD in International Development and Social Anthropology from the University of Bath.  

Dr Abeyasekera's scholarship focuses on contemporary South Asia and examines marriage, kinship, and intimate relations; women’s subjectivities and ethical self-making; the moral economy of care and the gendered labour of homemaking; and cross-cultural expressions of morality, emotions, and wellbeing.  She is specifically interested in 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.

Dr Abeyasekera's fieldwork methods combine ethnography with life-histories and narratives of personal experience.  As a feminist anthropologist, she is 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 in Sep 2022, Asha served as the coordinator for the MA in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka (2012-2021).  In 2022, she was an International Fellow of Urban Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. 

Current Research: 

Dr Abeyasekera is the co-lead researcher on Sri Lanka for the UKRI_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". Her 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. 

She is 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.