Shashini Gamage (PhD, La Trobe)

Shashini Gamage is a researcher, journalist, and filmmaker, based in Australia and Sri Lanka.Her research examines gender, media, and migration, utilising ethnography, video and photographic methods. As a Research Associate, Sociology, at La Trobe University, Melbourne, she is affiliated to the Australian Research Council project ‘Ageing and New Media’, examining older Sri Lankan migrants’ use of digital and new media in Australia. She is also affiliated with the ‘Healthy Futures’ project of La Trobe University, examining the barriers and enablers for accessing healthcare in rural Australia, working with Karen refugee migrants of Myanmar. She is the recipient of an Australia Awards scholarship and conducted her PhD at La Trobe University (2012-16), producing a transnational media ethnography of Sri Lankan women’s soap opera cultures in Australia and Sri Lanka.

Her work in journalism includes producing documentaries about women, peace, and security during the civil war in Sri Lanka (2004-10). She is also the founder of Women Talk (2017), a digital archive of multimedia journalism that documents feminist activism in Sri Lanka. She is also a filmmaker and her filmography includes short fiction films Kali’s Daughter (2018) and award-winning My Family (2007), dealing with issues of domestic violence. She collaborated with the Centre for Migration Research and Development (CMRD) in producing mobility videos to document journeys of urban displacement in Sri Lanka for the project The Unknown City: the (In)visibility of Urban Displacement.



Shashini’s Publications

Journal Articles

  1. Gamage, S (2020), ’Migration, identity, and television audiences: Sri Lankan women’s soap opera clubs and diasporic life in Melbourne’, Media International Australia, vol. 176, no. 1, pp. 93-106.
    [link]

  2. Wilding, R, Gamage, S, Worrel, S, Mohamud, S and Baldassar, L (2020), ’Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 639-655.
    [link]

  3. Gamage, S. R., (2018), Soap operas, women, and the nation: Sri Lankan women’s interpretations of home-grown mega teledramas, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 18, 873-887
    [link]

Books

  1. Gamage, S (forthcoming), ’Soap operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora: a transnational ethnography in Australia and Sri Lanka’, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Chapters

  1. Gamage, S and Jayatilaka, D (2022), ’Life-story narratives, memory maps, and video stories: spatial narratives of urban displacement in Sri Lanka’, in Katarzyna Grabska and Christina Clark-Kazak (Eds.), Documenting Displacement: Questioning Methodological Boundaries in Forced Migration Research, pp. 338-360, McGill-Queen’s University Press.
    [link]

  2. Gamage, S (2019), ’Sri Lankan migrant women watching teledramas in Melbourne: a social act of identity’, in Roza Tsagarousianou and Jessica Retis (eds), Handbook of Diaspora, Media and Culture, Wiley-Blackwell and International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), Hoboken.
    [link]

Academic Conferences

  1. Wilding, R, Gamage, S, Worrel, S and Baldassar, L (2020). Digital media and gendered practices of home: insights from older Sinhalese and Karen migrants in Australia. Paper presented at Gender, Migration, and Digital Networks in Asia Conference, National University of Singapore, Singapore, February 20-21.

  2. Gamage, S (2018). Migration, identity, and television audiences: Sri Lankan women’s soap opera clubs and diasporic life in Melbourne. Paper presented at Re-thinking Trans-Asia Media Flows from Australia, Funded by Australian Research Council, Organised by Monash University and Melbourne University, Melbourne, Australia, August 22-23.

  3. Gamage, S (2015). An appropriation of mainstream television in the struggle for meanings: an ethnographic study of Sri Lankan migrants watching teledramas in Melbourne. Paper presented at the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference, University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada, July 12-16.