I lived an embedded participatory life in diverse cultural communities. As an insider-outsider, I weaved an empirical research engagement on homeland issues of wartime governance and oral histories of living through civil war, with motherhood and life in Europe. Active engagement took forms of ethnographic field research, dialogue, workshop participation and humanitarian support. Importantly, I sustained conversations, trust and friendship relations across the lines.

Post-doc, I educate and mentor individuals and groups in and beyond academia.

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Colombo (1991-2001)

Born and raised in postcolonial Sri Lanka, I started out at 19 in the early 90s in pharma marketing at Hoechst Ceylon and decided to be a lawyer. As the university entrance was delayed by two years due to militant insurgency in southern Sri Lanka, I entered Law College and worked as an English copywriter at Grant McCann-Erickson and Phoenix Ogilvy ad agencies. Taking oaths at the Supreme Court, I worked with leading lawyers in public administrative law, criminal appellate and supreme court

fundamental rights appeals. I then left the courts to...

Bruxelles (Brussels) (2001-2008)

I entered Europe, as an LLM student in EU and International Comparative Law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2001, days before 9/11 erupted in the USA. I witnessed a New Year launching the Euro dawn in a spirit of hope and peace in the union of European states. Lectured by the Commissioners and practitioners themselves, the international cohort of a lawyer-per-country studied subjects including State Aid, Enlargement and EU Treaty Freedoms of Movement. Prof Jonathan Faull, the author of the first and only textbook on EU competition law, lectured us on the subject. Then called the PILC (Program for International Legal Cooperation now conducted by the Brussels School of Governance,

this was the best embedded participatory European field experience.

EU-Sri Lanka (2004-2007)

In 2004 I was the lead researcher on a three-year peace education book project in Sri Lanka funded by a Dutch NGO, Cordaid, part of the Caritas Intl network and implemented by a local Srilankan NGO, Foundation for Co-Existence, headed by the international peace and security analyst Dr Kumar Rupesinghe (former head of PRIO, Oslo and International Alert, London). An exercise in multicultural team relationship management, I worked remote from Brussels with Colombo based co-researcher, Ecuadorian political science graduate, Maria Jose-Bermeo, Indonesian and Dutch researchers, including in-person meetings with Dutch and Sri Lankan NGO colleagues in Den Haag and Colombo. The first text Nonviolent Coexistence: Moving Communities beyond Suspicion, Violence and Weapons of War was translated into the

national languages of Sri Lanka -Sinhala and Tamil. Dr Duncan Morrow of the Northern Ireland Community ... and Pushtun activist for jirga based nonviolent resolution of conflict, a Californian Jewish activist in Palestine were among the diverse contributors of original chapters including the first publication of the private letters of FARC hostage Guillermo Gaviria Correa the peace interventionist from Colombia's political elite. The second book of oral histories of peacebuilders examined the contribution of those motivated by their innate desire for peaceful communities in conflict zones, produced to counter the bias in donor circles that big bucks from international NGOs was the motivation to engage in peacebuilding in impoverished crisis communities. I was introduced to the significance of oral history data in understanding and incorporating contradiction, nuance and the unexpected. The Mennonite scholar John Paul Lederach chaired the international review panel and this book included chapters on Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines and India. The multicultural research team swelled with the addition of an Indonesian and a Dutch researcher. I married my German husband days before the Asian tsunami of Dec 2004. The publications were launched in Aug 2007 at a peace conference in Colombo during the hostile breakdown of ceasefire in Sri Lanka. Diplomats, activists, faith leaders, community and governance leaders and politicians as well as diaspora peace activists were in attendance. I began life as a trailing spouse in Feb 2008, as my husband's career moved our young family to Firenze, (Florence).

Firenze (Florence) (2008-2015)

A research career in setback-mode, I began my seven-year stint in Italy learning Italian and more importantly studying the particular cultural traits which were subtle, historically ingrained and did not appear to resonate with a transactional logic familiar to me. Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in May 2009. I first visited the former closed off warzone, the Jaffna Peninsula in 2011, gathering oral histories of teachers and a WHO doctor who had remained in the warzone opening classrooms and running health services for a quarter of a century. This would form preliminary research for a thesis undertaken six years later. In the aftermath of war I curated an independent website iSrilankan.com and created podcasts and digital content with an iMac uniting the Sri Lankan middle of the road voices in the diaspora and local communities. My Tamil diaspora community network swelled. Humanitarian intervention in

the former northern warzone began with that first teacher-interviewee now head of an orphanage. In Italy I met leading oral historians Prof Alessandro Portelli and Prof Luisa Passerini and worked as a freelance copyeditor of academic publications completing the Introduction to Proofreading of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP now CEIP), UK. However the main life achievement in these seven years was setting up home as a mother of two young children integrating with knowledge of Italian and an increasing understanding of how Fiorentinis related to transactions of quotidien life. Firenze was Tuscan and 'here nothing much had happened since Leonardo (*@~) da Vinci and Michel (*$@~*) Angelo' said a cynical Italian lady! Later, my Californian friend and I would reflect on how we could not panic or react to economic austerity as others do, having lived among Italians post-2008 financial collapse. Experiential reality of tenacity and humanity in the face of economic uncertainty as daily I witnessed that a tightening of belts did not deter the ritual visit to a local pasticceria for the morning espresso, all dressed and shod elegantly. The discussing of the daily imponderabilia of life including the state of tomatoes as if life depended on it took on a significance in later engagement with social anthropology. Bourdieu's 'habitus' was a concept I would better understand for having lived in such particular cultural contexts and for the first time away from the capital city, where English nor French languages were ever heard. In 2015 with a nine year old daughter and five year old son we moved to Greater London, an international hub where we could finally settle down.

Greater London (2015 to date)

I began my PhD research study at the University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science under the supervision of Prof Jonathan Spencer. The thesis is live at Schooling-in-wartime in Northern Sri Lanka: a Bourdieusian exploration. I examined the framework of public governance in postcolonial Sri Lanka and how teachers in the northern warzone had experienced war. Employing the oral history method, I first recorded the strong empirical research data both textured and layered in the former warzone interviewing former principals, teachers and bureaucrats. They were all Tamil and I, a Sinhalese added a layer of reconciliation and healing to this process. All teachers save one had never been asked how they had kept schools open and students sitting national exams over a quarter century of civil war. It was life-changing for me, and is the single most important original work I will ever do. I used Bourdieu's meta-theoretical framework of sociology, My daughter entered University of Edinburgh and I graduated later on that year in

2024. My foster child at the Jaffna orphanage had entered the University of Jaffna in 2022. Post-war, post tsunami, post-Islamic cell terror attack, post-economic collapse, Sri Lanka emerged to an era of peace, unity and democratic values shared by all ethnic communities.

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