Dr Sheleyah Courtney

Lecturer

Room 156, RC Mills Building A26
+61 2 9351 6681

I hold a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Sydney, 2003. My research was conducted among marginalised and impoverished intra-state migrant women of Varanasi, a holy city in North India. My research explores issues in Hindu diasporic urban communities in India such as violence, cosmology, gender, space and cultural understandings of illness. My expertise embraces Comparative Religion, Asian Diaspora. My theoretical expertise encompasses phenomenological and psychological anthropology; my research and teaching are also informed by critical feminist theory concerning personhood, gender, embodiment and space as intrinsic dimensions of social relations in India.

Indian religion - among which some are Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam - is a critical dimension of my scholarship and one with which I have long been fascinated. I have focused especially on Hindu religious developments ranging from classical Indian philosophy, medieval Kashmiri Tantric Shaivism and the efflorescence of both Bhakti devotionalism and the rise of Goddess traditions. These specific interests are underpinned by a first love of Comparative religion, Comparative mysticism and Comparative mythology and have entailed a long involvement with iconography. Hence Visual Anthropology is a domain of anthropology that informs my research and teaching in which Hindu art and Indian Cinema are particularly important dimensions.

My subsequent scholarship has extended my expertise and generated a range of experience in central areas of Urban Anthropology, and the Anthropology of Development. My expertise on India in conjunction with these two arenas has distinctive relevance to my approach to the Anthropology of Migration and Globalisation. Stemming from my field research in Varanasi, I have developed considerable interest both in regional migration and in international diaspora, particularly as it pertains to Australia. The Anthropology of Development is also relevant to my approach to migration in its focus on shifts from development centred on nation-states to the rise of neo-liberalism and globalisation. In this regard the emergence of India as a pivotal nation-state in world affairs and the global economy is a significant aspect of my anthropological focus on migration. My work on communal violence between Hindus and Muslims and gender relations in India has informed my observation of recent socio-religious rioting in diasporic contexts elsewhere in the world, particularly in Sydney. I am hence concerned with the articulation of nationalisms and gender relations in various re-workings of the colonial past in the context of peoples' designation as “ethnic minorities” in Australia and as well as the effects of displacement from India. I am currently extending my research on migration within India with a new research project concerning itinerant women and HIV in India.