Dr Jayanthi Lingham

Jayanthi joined the Centre for Care in July 2022 as a Research Associate working in the team Care Trajectories and Constraints, with a focus on researching Borders and Care. Previously, Jayanthi was a research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick (2019-22). From 2021-22, she worked on the ESRC-funded study, Care, Caring and Carers, examining the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns on racially minoritised older people and their paid and unpaid carers in the UK, with a focus in the Midlands. The research was undertaken within the Consortium on Practices for Wellbeing and Resilience in Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Families and Communities in the UK (Co-POWeR). Before joining the Co-POWeR study, Jayanthi worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the Monash-Warwick Alliance funded study, Inclusive Economies, Enduring Peace: The Transformative Role of Social Reproduction (2019-21), which studied the costs of social reproductive labour in conflict-affected Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Her PhD (SOAS Development Studies 2019) examined women’s working lives in the post-war context of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province. She has an MA in International Studies and Diplomacy, also from SOAS, and a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. She has taught on undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the Development Studies and Politics departments at SOAS, and on modules on global development at Goldsmiths.

Jayanthi’s research interests include feminist and critical historical approaches to the international political economy of development, gender regimes, and violence and conflict. She is especially interested in the ways that structural violence and dispossession connect to and manifest in the everyday; on care as part of social reproduction; and on research at the intersection of ‘crisis’ and ‘development’. She also brings to the Centre her experience using qualitative research methods in complex and sensitive environments.

In her role at the Centre for Care, Jayanthi is working with Professor Majella Kilkey on the research Borders and Care. The study examines the role of bordering processes in shaping experiences of care among racially minoritised/Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee people in the UK. The focus is on the lived experiences across the life course of older people and their care networks, and the data will be collected via in-depth qualitative methods.