Discussion: Researching Social Justice and Caste Issues in the North-East

December 2, 2016

The Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research and the Social Science Section of the Jaffna Science Association held a discussion on researching social justice issues in the North and East featuring three anthropologists who have studied the issue extensively in the North-East of Sri Lanka:

Francesca Bremner has MA, MPhil and PhD degrees in sociology from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. She has been traveling and conducting research throughout the warzone primarily in Eastern Sri Lanka since 2004 and has formerly been a consultant to the UN, USAID and the Asian Development Bank. She has just recently completed a novel that is awaiting publication on the Sri Lankan civil war. She currently teaches at Queens College, City University of New York.

P. Thanges holds a BA honours degree in Sociology from the University of Peradeniya. His undergraduate dissertation research focused on the interplay between caste and ethnicity in Jaffna society. He was formerly at lecturer in Sociology at the University of Colombo, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of East London.

Prashanth Kuganathan has a MA in South Asian Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. His MA thesis focused on caste in postwar Jaffna. He is currently pursuing a PhD in applied anthropology and the anthropology of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where his research focuses on English language education in postwar Sri Lanka.