Kanchana N Ruwanpura

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Om Kanchana N Ruwanpura

ACADEMIC LIFE:

Kanchana is a feminist scholar writing on current topics related to global development, ranging from global debt distress to global production processes. Her insightful scholarship has also focused on infrastructure politics (the BRI: belt and road initiative) to feminist analysis of post-disaster reconstruction and post-conflict settings.

Kanchana read for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, pivoting away from her initial disciplinary training in economics at William Smith College, USA; and her scholarship speaks to debates in feminist political economy, human geography and development studies. Her most recent research monograph Garments without Guilt? Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels (GWG) (2022) published by Cambridge University Press (with regional editions) exemplifies this inter-disciplinary engagement. This book draws on her extended research that started in 2008 with funding from ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) in the U.K. The monograph has excellent reviews with book forums in Antipode and Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, and reviews in Economic and Political Weekly, AAG Review of Books, Polity, and by award winning journalist Tansy Hoskins in The Resurgence. Prior to (GWG), her first book, Matrilineal Communities, Patriarchal Realities: A Feminist Nirvana Uncovered was published by University of Michigan Press (2006), with simultaneous editions in India by Zubaan Books and the Social Scientist Association in Sri Lanka. Written during her time as a Humboldt Research Fellow, it was favourably reviewed in Feminist Economics, Contemporary South Asia, Norwegian Journal of Geography, Polity, Good Reads and The Book Review India.

RESEARCH THEMES:

1) Global debt distress and financialized architecture;

2) Labour geographies;

3) Infrastructural politics and development;

4) Post-disaster, conflict and post-conflict development politics;

5) Ethical trading and global governances;

6) Feminist politics;

7) Critical pedagogies and qualitative research methods.

RESEARCH AREAS:

Sri Lanka, South Asia and the global South in collaboration with academic peers.

RESEARCH:

Other volumes to Kanchana’s credit includes writing projects she has undertaken with colleagues she has closely collaborated with. She edited book with Helsinki University Press (in press) with Wilfried Swenden, with whom she co-Directed the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh between 2015-2019. Their close collaboration culminated in a BA-GCRF grant to capture state-labour dynamics during CoVID-19 in South Asia. This edited volume comes on the back of Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Sri Lanka, published open access in 2025 with a generous grant from Handelshögskolan at the University of Gothenburg. She worked with a practitioner in the human rights world Amjad Saleem to bring this volume to fruition. Shirlena Huang and she worked together on the Handbook on Gender in Asia published by Edward Elgar in 2020 for its International Handbook Series for the series editor (late) Sylvia Chant (which was republished in 2022 in paperback). Special journal issues with Feminist Economics and Contemporary South Asia alone or with others also are her body of writing, as are her journal articles in numerous journals.

Kanchana’s edited volumes also includes work she collaborated on with colleagues in Sri Lanka. Her Smile Lingers - Malathi de Alwis: Selected Essays (open access), brought together the scholarship of feminist anthropologist (late) Malathi de Alwis, her mentor and friend, whose life was cut short through a terminal illness. She worked together with Caryll Tozer, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Chulani Kodikara, Sonali Deriniyagala and Vraie Cally Balthazar – and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka on this volume. After the tsunami in Sri Lanka (and elsewhere), she worked together with Neloufer de Mel and Gameela Samarasinghe to bring together After the Waves: The Impact of Tsunami Women in Sri Lanka published by Social Scientist Association. This edited volume was also translated into Sinhala and Tamil in 2010 to make the writings accessible to a broader community.

AWARDS, ACHIEVEMENTS, AND ACADEMIA:

The funding for Kanchana’s research has come from numerous sources: In the U.K. from the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, Global Challenges funded by NERC-ESRC-AHRC, where she has worked with colleagues across the social and natural sciences (Hugh Sinclair, for instance). The European Research Council, Adlerbetska Foundation and Jubilee Fund (Sweden) have also funded her research. Additionally, she been a Humboldt Fellow (Göttingen University and Ludwig Maximillians University, Germany), France-ILO Nantes Fellow (IAS-Nantes, France), and a Senior Research Fellow at ARI (NUS, Sinhgapore) at various stages of her academic career. Other achievements include been awarded the Rhonda Williams Prize (2005) by IAFFE (International Assocation for Feminist Economics) and Clarence Ayres Prize (2023) by AFEE (Association for Evolutionary Economics).

In terms of engagement to the wider academic community, Kanchana has been an editor of Gender, Place and Culture(2016-2024) and Geoforum (2014-2020). And, she currenly serves on several editorial boards: Environment and Planning A, Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture and Contemporary South Asia. Kanchana has also collaborated with international organizations, including the ILO and UNDP; and with labour rights organizations, including the Women’s Centre, DaBindu and Asia Floor Wage.

Kanchana’s teaching has spanned from undergraduate to masters and doctoral studies. She has taught or teaches on development geographies, qualitative methods, research ethics, globalization and uneven development, history of geographical thought, feminist theories, theories of development, contemporary south asia, feminist political economy and gender and development. Her thesis supervision has extended from undergraduate to taught masters and PhD students. She welcomes doctoral students across a range of topics and countries open to adopting critical social theory perspectives.

Kanchana N Ruwanpura

Professor

Om Kanchana N Ruwanpura

ACADEMIC LIFE:

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