Research specializations include: Sociology of Migration, Gendered Carework, Temporalities, Emotions, Sociology of Food, Sociology of the Body, Multiple Modernities, New Cosmpolitanisms, folk Hinduism

My work has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals including Global Networks; Ethnic and Racial Studies; Journal of Youth Studies; Emotion, Space and Society; Journal of Intercultural Studies; Geographical Research; Geoforum; and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

I research and contribute to academic scholarship within four interconnected literature streams. Namely:

1. Transnational Families & Diasporas
2. Gendered Labour Migration & Carework
3. Folk Hinduism
4. Intersectional Embodiments

My overlapping research interests are explained below in turn:

(1) Transnational Families & Diasporas

I earned my PhD in Sociology from Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). A monograph developed from my dissertation research has been published with the University of Toronto Press (UTP). Cosmopolitan Maternalisms: Migration, Kinship, and Coorg Mothering in Modernity (2025), is available for order here.

Most recently I am co-PI for the Perspectives on Identity, Nationality, Diasporic Affinities, and Home  (PINDAH)  project on the Indonesian diaspora in Singapore (PI: Dr Erica Larson) and a collaborator on the Migration and Food Security in the Global South (MiFOOD Project) (PI: Professor Jonathan Crush) which is focused on food security among migrants from the Global South in destination cities.  

(2) Gendered Labour Migration & Carework

An enduring research interest of mine has been around the social resilience of migrant, transnational, and left-behind families across class, socio-economic status, precarity, and socio-economic inequalities. This led me to the arena of low-waged labour migration and its impact of left-behind families. My recent work looks at the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic and its differential impacts in terms of carework and foodwork across the Southeast Asian region. This includes work on Burmese migrant domestic workers’ biopedagogies and food security efforts, as well as Indonesian migrant domestic workers’ ‘transnational foodcare chains’ during the pandemic. I interrogate the gendered dimensions of working-class mothers’ labours of ensuring food security and positive health outcomes for their left-behind children. Inter-generationally, I have examined grandparental carework of left-behind children, as well as the impact of left-behind youth’s experiences of maternal migration on their aspirations. A paper on left-behind youth’s temporal emotion work was Highly Commended for the prestigious Andy Furlong Prize in the Journal of Youth Studies. You may read it here.

Previously I have been involved in collaborative research projects including the Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHAMPSEA) Wave 2 (PI: Professor Brenda Yeoh) project which is a multi-country, longitudinal study on the impacts of parental labour migration and absence on left-behind families in Indonesia and the Philippines; and the Healthcare and ‘Foodwork’ among Foreign Domestic Workers and their Children in Southeast Asia (HealthFood) Project (PI: Professor Brenda Yeoh) which looked at the health and wellbeing of migrant domestic workers in Singapore during the pandemic years.

(3)    Folk Hinduism

My academic interest in folk Hinduism began nearly two decades ago. My first journal article on this can be found in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, here. I have since contributed to research on Hinduisms in Singapore including a book chapter, an encyclopedic entry, and another journal article on festival foodwork which foregrounds the idea of ‘affiliative emplacement’.

(4)    Intersectional Embodiments

As a decolonial, feminist scholar my research portfolio consists of ongoing broader work on sociologies of the body, and everyday racism. My work is conceptually driven to disrupt taken-for-granted and essentialized markers of national sorting and classification of diverse nationalities, races, ethnicities, genders, and embodiments, and explores the impacts of these on individuals, and communities. Some of this collaborative work includes virtual ethnographies (netnographies), and ethnographic methodological experimentations. These have been published in Race and Ethnic Studies, and Emotion, Space and Society respectively.

Please drop me an email if you encounter issues with accessing any of my journal articles which are not Open Access. I will be happy to send across a pdf particularly for those without institutional access.