SASC Colloquium Series: Economic justice, and ‘measured intervention’: Research impact activities amidst Global Crises, Sandya Hewamanne

This talk focuses on a national village subcontractors’ association led by former global factory workers of Sri Lanka that were initiated via a research impact activity. Since its inception in 2019, the association faced a global pandemic and related national economic crisis thus forcing the organization to evolve in unexpected ways. Sandya’s earlier work analyzed the journey of the association as a beginning of an economic justice movement. However, the current national economic crisis necessitates rethinking of the conventional definitions and trajectories of grassroots economic justice. The talk will thus explore the role of the association in the current economic climate and what it means for feminist approaches to political economy.
Sandya Hewamanne is a professor of Anthropology and the director of the Center for Global South Studies at the University of Essex, United Kingdom. She is the author of Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka, University of Pennsylvania Press (2008); Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers: (Un)Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles in a Post-Colonial Society, Routledge (2016); Re-stitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Contentment, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020) and the co-editor of The Political Economy of Post-COVID Life and Work in the Global South: Pandemic and Precarity (Springer 2022). She is the Founder, Director of IMPACT-Global Work, a non-profit which connects academics and activists to initiate beneficial policies for workers in the Global South.