Research Philosophy & Interests

My research philosophy is grounded in a multiperspectival patchwork quilt of epistemologies. As an emerging scholar dedicated to the practice of culturally sustaining research, I believe knowledge production is a social and discursive construction. Further, my cultural frameworks of understanding tell me that “power is omnipresent," and as such I recognize the significant role of culture and power in shaping knowledge production. Therefore, within my worldview, reality, meaning, and knowledge are constructed through experiences in, and interactions with, the world. In autobiographical terms, my preoccupation with questions of culture, identity, difference, and belonging began in 1984 when my family moved to British Hong Kong from India. This move - the first of many - introduced me to my difference. Throughout my life, my difference(s) have been translated, represented, and used to position me as either an outsider, an insider, or an other-sider[1]. These experiences have informed and shaped my understanding (knowledge) of the role difference plays in determining how we experience our worlds.

Formally, my training as a British cultural studies scholar insists on the practice of self-reflexivity, which requires a critical examination of my routes - the multiple context-specific meanings my difference(s) has carried in the various spaces and places that I have occupied in my life, and how my differences have either worked for me or against me in shaping my experiences. This understanding of my routes informs not only the story I choose to tell about my-Self  but also the story I choose to tell about who I am as a scholar and researcher. These stories work together to communicate the positions from which I write and speak, informed by a particular history that contains the collective sensemaking of the many ways my difference has been identified, read, and translated in the many spaces and places I have occupied in my life. I write this introduction to situate myself as a cultural studies scholar, who has ‘been living the problem’ that drives her research endeavors and seeks to understand the influence of culture, power and difference in the lives of those of us who shuttle between multiple contexts – local, national, and global – that position us in various spaces and places in our respective worlds.

As a scholar whose work is situated at the intersections of British cultural studies, Literary Studies, and Media Studies, my research interests focus on exploring the intersections of Culture, Power, And Difference in Indian and South Asian Diasporic/Transnational cultural production, particularly in media and literature. I began this work in my dissertation, Written into Representation: The South Asian Girl in Cultural Texts, through which ******I explored how narratives embedded in popular cultural texts—in literature, film, or emerging digital forms—reflect and shape the construction of cultural identities.

My broad research agenda involves the construction of interdisciplinary projects that explore cultural production to ask questions of Difference, Identity, and Representation as not only vehicles of power but also sites of resistance. Specifically, I will explore questions of power - hegemonic ideologies and discourses- and how cultural producers from India and South Asian diasporic and transnational spaces use their particular margins as a site of resistance[2] to construct counter-discourses and narratives in and through representations. The guiding research question that drives this area of inquiry is: How do cultural producers - authors, film makers and musicians - engage with and resist dominant narratives through their work? Also, I am interested in exploring the theoretical and methodological affordances of using the framework of Intersectionality in the study of representations as sites of resistance in and through cultural production.

Dissertation Study

A British cultural studies project informed by the social constructionist understanding of identities as social and discursive constructions influenced by difference, informed by discourse, and implied by representation. ****The multiperspectival theoretical framework used in the study treats the notions of difference, discourse, and representation as vehicles of power and maps their individual and collective influence in the construction of cultural identities. Situated at the intersection of Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, and Sociology, my dissertation is a study about stories – single stories containing representations of model minorities, perpetual foreigners, and other simple frames of references that restrict and erase the complexities that exist in the lives of South Asian girls in the United States. Then, against the backdrop of these single stories, there are stories a group of South Asian girls tell about themselves by first talking back[3] and then writing back[4] to representations of themselves in their worlds.  The stories generated through this study were pieced together from discussions during the 'Read and Talk Club' (talking back) and a digital collage project (writing back) that put the girls in charge of their representations, where they were the subjects of their representations instead of objects of other peoples – more powerful – representations.

The study generated data from three sources - book discussion, digital collage project interviews, and textual analysis of young adult novels – in order to trace the flow of meaning from cultural production (representations) to the cultural consumption and sense-making of the representations found in cultural texts. The data generated through the various phases of the study were analyzed using methods that can be best described as a bricolage of analytic approaches drawn from the humanities (close readings and reading as method) and social science approaches. The girls' overall understanding of representations and their self-representations tell us a story. Their narratives (stories) reflect their sense-making of place, identity, and belonging and their individual acts of resistance against context-specific discourses that construct them in ways that weaponize their difference and attempt to marginalize them and put their belonging into question. These findings from my dissertation study shifted my attention to the power of literary representations in the construction of identities and subjectivities.

Short-Term Research Agenda: Informed by the findings of my dissertation, I have developed three interconnected lines of inquiry that ask after the discursive construction of South Asian (im)migrant[5] youth identities and experiences in young adult novels. The first strand explores the Texts and the representations they contain. The second strand examines the context - the historical, social, and cultural discourses that inform the representations identified in the first strand of inquiry. The third strand places the findings of the text (representations) and context (discourses) in conversation with each other to answer the central research question: How is the South Asian Diasporic youth experience and identity discursively constructed in the selected young adult novels?

Rationale: There is a significant gap in understanding how the contemporary lives and experiences of South Asian (im)migrant youth are written into representation by authors who share their cultural, social, and geographic location. The existing body of knowledge accumulated around the representations of diasporic realities and experiences of the South Asian Diaspora is written by first-generation authors for a predominantly adult audience, and centers on the challenges posed by their circumstantial realities. My research seeks to add to the conversation and perhaps even open up a dialogue about the importance of recognizing the unique experiences faced by South Asian youth growing up in the spaces and places they call Home - symbolic and geographic - across local, national, and global boundaries. One way of doing this is to explore and interrogate the representation of South Asian youth experiences and identities in young adult novels and use this to generate a thematic narrative, a story about the lived experiences of our youth written for our youth to help them make sense of their journey.

Research Projects: Summaries

THE TEXT: Exploring Representations (Thematic): Through this project, I intend to examine the discursive construction of South Asianness[6] in young adult literature - stories written for and about South Asian youth within the diaspora, including but not limited to novels originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. I also intend to extend the selection criteria to include graphic novels, historical fiction, and fantasy genres. The culmination of this effort will be the development of a book manuscript designed to initiate discussions regarding the significance of advancing scholarship that focuses on the thematic concerns articulated by authors who center the everyday lives and experiences of South Asian diasporic/transnational youth. However, I do not seek to unearth an essentialized singular South Asian youth experience, identity, or representation. Instead, I aim to explore the many possible similarities and significant context-specific differences in how South Asianness is constructed and written into representation.

CONTEXT: Identifying Discourses & Single Stories: The literary genre of fiction is a cultural production that originates from and shapes the social, cultural, and ideological understandings of the individuals, cultures, and lifestyles represented within the narrative. The insights acquired by identifying and delineating the various local, national, and global discourses specific to the narrative's setting will facilitate the analysis of its social and cultural contexts. This project will gather, synthesize, analyze, and ascertain the knowledge around discourses and representations of South Asians in the locations of the novels identified in the first project. The findings will inform the textual analysis that seeks to unearth the discourses, discursive practices, and overall experiences in the stories. For example, understanding the immigration history of South Asians in various geographic locations will help differentiate the experience, representations, and historical meanings ascribed to the population by dominant narratives (discourses). This project involves a mapping review of scholarship from across disciplines that speaks to the construction of South Asianness in the locations of interest. It aims to identify the contextual realities of the world in which the story originates, operates, refers to, and is situated[7].

THE TEXT & CONTEXT: This project aims to ascertain how the author discursively constructs difference, culture, and identity in their novels. The analysis will involve looking for identifiable discourses, including stereotypes or new representations within the texts, with the help of a theoretical frame that will help trace representations back to the discourses that give them meaning. This will allow for a deeper analysis of the representations identified in the previous project, as it can go beyond a thematic analysis and explore the possible presence of counter-discourses.

Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks: To answer these projects’ specific research questions, I will construct theoretical and conceptual frameworks informed by transdisciplinary theoretical - postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and youth studies - and methodological - ****textual analysis, discourse analysis, and comparative studies -approaches to examine the discursive construction of South Asianness in young adult literature from across the diaspora.

The Missing Reader: I recognize that we are missing a crucial contributor to this conversation: the Reader. This piece is the subject of a longer-term research aspiration to ask readers of these stories about their interpretation, and meaning-making of the representations and narratives embedded in the stories. This project is a work in progress, and the specific research design—methods and methodologies—and research questions require the completion of the aforementioned projects.

Long-Term Theoretical & Pedagogical Agenda

Detours Through Theory: Pedagogical Papers in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies

As a research scholar, I plan to create a series of conceptual and pedagogical papers that engage with key theoretical ideas in cultural and postcolonial studies. These papers will introduce students to the theoretical history and contemporary interpretations of Culture, Difference, Identity, Space, and Place within cultural and postcolonial studies. These papers aim to make complex theoretical ideas accessible to students while encouraging critical engagement with key themes in cultural and postcolonial studies. Each paper will provide a theoretical framework for understanding how culture, identity, space, and movement are intertwined and offer students tools for thinking about the implications of these concepts in the contemporary world.

Culture and Difference: A Theoretical Genealogy