yaso Nadarajah

Yasothara (Yaso) Nadarajah is a Senior Research Fellow of the Social Equity Research Centre (SERC) and an Associate Professor of Global Studies at RMIT's School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS).

Yaso is a researcher, educator and development sociologist with special interest in the areas of human ingenuity, community engagement, sacred investment, and development. Her commitment to establishing an international and regional cross-sector reference across remote located, primarily Indigenous and tribal communities globally, has meant spending more than sixty percent of her time in the field, and working through both local and global challenges in areas stretched and remade by reclaimed customary practices and cultural protocol, national agendas and global markets.

Yaso's research is wide span across the social sciences, and combines the fields of Education, Migration Studies, Diasporic Studies, Island Studies, global ethnography, political geography, and ocean studies. Her work draws together so many different elements from so many different geographical regions, including Nuuk (Greenland), Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Gambia (Africa), Sri Lanka, Svalbard (Norway), India, China and Australia. Since 2016, Yaso has consolidated her body of work primarily around two questions: one which is about being and becoming an academic as a permanent work in progress; and how through that, she prioritizes the voices of the marginalized and forge coalitions across cultural and knowledge differences. The distinctive argument in her scholarship lies more strongly in the decolonial option – deconstructing the culturality and coloniality in the structures of power underpinning modernity.

Her fieldwork is aligned to build connections where people can come together, embrace differences and form mutually enriching and productive coalitions against intermeshed violence and oppression. How can we embrace deep difference; delighting and drawing richly from the very different places where we originate and that inform our sensibilities, tendencies and lifeworlds? Yaso holds relationships with diverse communities and places, expanding the core disciplinary nature of global studies; but also, through expanding the core disciplinary nature of courses, research, and engagement. around the questions of the sacred, social change and ‘building from the ground-up'.

Yaso is Co-Editor-in-Chief, of Folk, Knowledge, Place; Adjunct Professor at Centurion University (India); Affiliate Professor at Research Center for Indian Ocean Island Countries, School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology (China); Island Studies Foundation/Trust Board member - Fróðskaparsetur Føroya/ University of the Faroe Islands; Visiting Professor, University Malaya (Malaysia); Visiting Professor, Taylors University, Malaysia; Tribal Elder, Kukukuku Tribal Elders Council, Papua New Guinea; Committee Member, Lake Bolac Eel festival, Victoria, Australia; and a member of GUSS Research Committee. Previously, Yaso was an Executive Member of the Centre for Global Research (2005–2009) & Research Program Manager of the Community Sustainability Program in RMIT Global Cities Institute (2009–2017). She was Head, Intercultural Projects & Resources Unit (IPRU) 1997–2005; and is an alumna of the Committee for Melbourne Future Focus Group Leadership program.