I received my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University in 2014. For that last eight years I have been working on the collusion between cultural production of suffering and mobile identities in the context of contemporary migration and migrant-integration pathways and practices. As a post-doctoral fellow, my project Working the Paper: Transnational Suffering Narration and Documentation in (post-civil war) Nepal explores suffering grounded on socio-existential values and the technologies governing transnational migration in the post-civil-war context. Drawing on debates in anthropology of suffering, phenomenology, international migration and critical asylum and refugee studies, I specifically look at re-articulations of suffering embedded within and beyond migration-narratives produced in the context of post-civil war. Rather than presuppose a standardized (and politicized) account of suffering being circulated among Nepalis, I inquire into suffering under global conditions of transnational labor regimes that come to shape people’s sociality, work, and imagination.
My research project at IIAS examines the multi-faceted meaning of dukkha, or suffering, formulated by Nepali migrants at home and abroad that delineate a peculiar identity in the context of transnational labor migration to Southeast Asia and Europe. Building on my previous work, I interpret dukkha not as mere set of ideas but a specifically shared and changing social practice among Nepalis—a concrete moral responsibility on one hand, and an outcome of negotiating competing, and sometimes contradictory, values on the other. In particular, this project seeks to expand the debate on suffering by re-thinking the assumed conceptual divide between the moral and the material. The question I ask is how the term dukkha itself may extend across distinctly situated ambiguities, an everyday lived-experience and simultaneously a powerful narrative in the context of contemporary migrant-integration processes.