MA GNDS 2014
"My time spent in the Gender Studies department at Queen's University was instrumental in shaping my career in academia. It was an environment that had encouraged my endeavours in exploring creative and interdisciplinary topics through the incredible support of staff and faculty. During this time, I had the privilege of working under the supervision of Dr. Katherine McKittrick. Her guidance, scholarship, and pedagogy continue to contour the way I think about theory, narrative, creative texts, and humanness. I am so thankful that she was my introduction into academia.
From the work I began in my MA, I continued on to complete my PhD at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. My research focuses on the theoretical and experiential connections between objects, things, locations, and displacement for the South Asian Diaspora. I draw on diaspora, affect, object, story-telling, and postcolonial theories. My doctoral dissertation emphasized the ways in which objects that are laden with memory, emotion, and affect illuminate migratory cultures and the politics of home. In this work, I turned to alternative epistemological sites in archives of the personal as a point of analysis. These sites took up the form of what I call "affective objects": sites, things, heirlooms, and artefacts that, because they are intimately linked to familial and community histories, are laden with in-articulatable feelings. I argued that affective objects can be space- and knowledge-making for unheard intergenerational narratives of displacement. The work I completed during my Masters in Gender Studies gave me the theoretical backbone necessary to conduct this doctoral work and continues to influence my own pedagogical and scholarly practices.
I am currently working as an Assistant Professor, teaching stream, at the University of Toronto Scarborough at the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies."