Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka

Join the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation and Essex South Asia Research Network for an insightful online seminar with Dr Sandya Hewamanne.

Sandya Hewamanne is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex.  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) and Re-stitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Neoliberalism, Gender and Politics of Contentment, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).  She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on labor and human rights, gender, sexuality and economic anthropology. She is also the Convener of Essex South Asia Research Network (ESARN) and the Founder, Director of IMPACT-Global Work, a non-profit which connects academics and activists to initiate beneficial policies for global workers in third world countries. 

The UK launch of Dr Sandya Hewamanne’s latest book (Penn Press, 2020). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over fifteen years, the book follows women as they leave factory work in free-trade-zone in Sri Lanka and return to various home villages. She shows how the women manipulate varied forms of capital social, cultural, and monetary to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders. This innovative, path-breaking book challenges conventional notions about marginalized women at the bottom of the global economy.

 This seminar will be chaired by Professor Linsey McGoey.

This seminar is an online open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation and the Essex South Asian Research Network (ESARN).