​

​

Desi settler based in Tkaronto. Recent graduate of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Education, University of Toronto.    

 

My research explores how humanitarianism and international development create narratives of benevolence that mask how the Global North’s financial systems, militaries, and fossil fuel consumption drive much of the harm in our world. I make connections between settler colonialism, environmental destruction, mobilities and labour exploitation. I examine how narrow concepts of land as private property lead humanitarian groups to ignore the customary land laws and Indigenous land relations of the people they work with, and to evade the problem of land grabbing as a root cause of displacement. 

​

I build curricula and pedagogies that present complex ideas in ways that are clear to a broad audience. 

 

I believe academic work must center and cite the theory and practice of community-based activists and organizations. 

​

I am the first in my family born in Canada. My Gujarati (Indian) mother was born and raised in Kenya, and

my American father is Irish (paternal side)/Russian-Lithuanian Jewish (maternal side). Today my relatives live

across Canada and the US, in Thailand, India, and Kenya. My cross-cultural family, as well as years of

professional practice in teaching and program management across race, class and culture, inform my approach to equity. People move around this world by necessity but also by nature: travel and movement is a right everyone should have, and at the same time, we need to respect the Land and all beings who live in relation with it. Thinking through our shared history, layers of privilege and responsibilities to places and persons (human and otherwise) is a first step to making a better world. 

 

Justice for migrants everywhere is core to my work. Everyone should have the freedom to move, to stay and to return home.  Any response to climate change must include migrant voices and the ongoing defence of lands around the world.