Information About

Malathi De Alwis




De Alwis earned her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from University of Chicago and was a founding member of the Women Against War Coalition at the University.


RESEARCH

De Alwis describes her research interests in the following manner:
Much of my early work focused on gender, nationalism, militarism and resistance culminating in my dissertation research on the conditions of possibility of motherhood in political protest in Sri Lanka. I have extended my concern with these issues in two slightly different trajectories at present: (1) re-thinking feminist peace activism in Sri Lanka, especially how the category of the 'political' is constituted, mobilized and re-iterated and (2) interrogating the categories of suffering and sentiment --initially explored in conjunction with the category of motherhood-- within the broader context of humanitarian aid in times of conflict and the more recent tsunami which devastated vast swathes of the coast of Sri Lanka.

Source: Personal Website


SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Casting Pearls: The Women's Franchise Movement in Sri Lanka. With Kumari Jayawardena. Colombo: Social Scientists' Association, 2001.

"Capacity building, accountability and humanitarianism in Sri Lanka," with Jennifer Hyndman, in Pravada, Vol 7 (2), 2001: 7-10 (republished from Forced Migration Review 8).

"Ambivalent Maternalisms: Cursing as Public Protest in Sri Lanka" in The Aftermath: Women in Post-war Reconstruction, eds. Meredeth Turshen, Sheila Meintjes & Anu Pillay. London: Zed Press, 2001.

"The 'Purity' of Displacement and the Re-territorialization of Longing : Muslim Women Refugees in North-Western Sri Lanka", in Sites of Violence: Feminist Politics in Conflict Zones, eds.Wenona Giles & Jennifer Hyndman. Berkeley: University of California Press (in press).


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