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 the 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, an insider-outsider Sinhalese added a layer of reconciliation and healing to this process. Not a single teacher, save one, had ever 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 the single most important original work I would ever do.

 

Following oral history practice I returned to the teacher-interviews in the field from 2016-2019. I used Bourdieu's meta-theoretical framework of sociology, his conceptual approaches of habitus, capital, illusio and doxa, his scholastic device of field and else. To better understanding the historically ingrained dispositions that inform the habitus of the field relations I drew on archival materials on American Missionary education in the 1800s limited to the Jaffna Peninsula. This model approach informed a sociohistorical enquiry into a theory of practice in postcolonial societies. 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-extremist Islamist terror attacks, post-economic collapse, Sri Lankan communities moved together in the revolutionary Aragalaya, electing in 2024, a government led by a Prime Minister I had cited in my thesis, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, a social anthropologist of University of Edinburgh, to uphold democracy, reduce corruption, and offer the minorities a new promise of a united Sri Lankan identity.