Papers by Menusha De Silva
Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Routledge eBooks, Sep 26, 2022
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (FASS
The Professional Geographer
Area, 2018
Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its... more Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers' children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their "native" country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents' contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact-making and access, and providing emotional and practical care. The discussion illuminates two aspects of parents' involvement in fieldwork: (1) how the unique nature of parent-child relationships shapes the research process at multiple stages, and (2) how the gendered notions of knowledge production results in parents' contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her "native" country and is implicated in the wider research process.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
Journal of Cultural Geography, 2020
Area, 2019
Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its... more Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers’ children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their “native” country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents’ contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact‐making and access, and providing emotional and practical care. The discussion illuminates two aspects of parents’ involvement in fieldwork: (1) how the unique nature of parent–child relationships shapes the research process at multiple stages, and (2) how the gendered notions of knowledge production result in parents’
contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her “native” country and is implicated in the wider research process.
Population, Space and Place, 2017
uch of the scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families concentrates on ch... more uch of the scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families concentrates on challenges migrants encounter when providing care across transnational space. This paper focuses attention on older adults as transnational care recipients, their agency, and alternative sources of care. Drawing on the experiences of 35 affluent, urban older parents residing in Sri Lanka with at least one adult child who is a skilled, permanent migrant in Australia, I examine how the older parents adapt to the migration of their traditional caregivers, and how the family, community, market and state respond to this care gap to varying degrees. I propose a “care pentagon” as a framework to interrogate older persons' negotiations with these multiple caregivers in the home and host countries, and the manner these agents operate to form a tiered network of caregivers. Through the analysis, I highlight the care‐receiver's tendency to self‐care and the agency they exert within their relationships of care. The paper demonstrates that older persons' landscapes of care change both temporally and spatially as their levels of health and independence vary over time.
Gender, Place & Culture , 2018
The scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families focuses mainly on the exp... more The scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families focuses mainly on the experience of unskilled migrants and is presented largely from the perspective of caregivers. Few studies consider the case of affluent, skilled migrants, and their wealthy older parents who also cross borders to visit and provide care for their migrant adult–children. Through Baldassar and Merla’s concept of ‘care circulation’ and the lens of emotional transnationalism, the article illustrates that despite affluent transnational family members’ mobility and access to resources that should facilitate successful circulation of care, care is not easily exchanged at an intimate level. Drawing upon 30 transnational family case studies of skilled migrants residing in Australia and their urban, high to middle- income older parents from Sri Lanka, I argue that older parents construct both caring across distance and in proximity as an attentiveness to their emotional care needs, and the time and effort taken to engage in emotion work; a task that is more challenging for migrant sons than daughters. The article reveals the manner in which gendered care practices both enable and inhibit care circulation between transnational migrants and their older parents.
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Papers by Menusha De Silva
contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her “native” country and is implicated in the wider research process.
contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her “native” country and is implicated in the wider research process.