Charishma Ratnam

Dr Charishma Ratnam’s research examines the multiple dimensions of refugee resettlement and sits across the fields of social and cultural geography and migration studies. Her conceptual contributions to scholarship centre on memory, identity, and place, drawing from experiences of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Australia. She has collaborated and worked predominantly with Sri Lankan refugees and asylum seekers. Charishma is particularly interested in developing novel research approaches, including digital, visual, ethnographic, and walking methods with participants to better understand their experiences in and with place(s).

Charishma’s program of research, centring migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, has been developed through a number of funded research projects:

1.      Understanding how refugees use digital technologies during resettlement (2025-2027, Australian Research Council - DE250100078). This project aims to investigate how refugees use digital technologies to navigate resettlement in Australia. Taking the case of Sri Lankan refugees, and integrating robust digital and ethnographic methods, this project will generate new knowledge on how refugees use smartphones and digital applications to address their material and social needs in order to successfully resettle.

2.      Feeling safe in public places: Co-designing community safety strategies in Local Government Areas (2021-2023, Department of Justice and Community Safety, Victorian Government). This project was developed to enhance the capability of local councils and other community organisations to engage women from diverse backgrounds to better understand why some public spaces and places are viewed as ‘unsafe’.

3.      Co-designing and scaling effective COVID-19 communication strategies for young people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Victoria (2020-2021, Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, Victorian Government). This project examined digital communication and engagement with a focus on culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) young people and the key organisations in Victoria working with them.

Charishma graduated with a PhD in Human Geography from the University of New South Wales Australia in 2020. Previously, Charishma was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre at Monash University. Before joining RMIT University, she held a highly prestigious Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Deakin University. She has also held visiting positions at the University of Lisbon (Portugal), Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada), and Stockholm University (Sweden).

Charishma is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Social Equity Research Centre in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies.