The Desirous Public: Public Pedagogy as Symptomatic Text
This article theorizes public pedagogy through the idea of the “desirous public,” examining how public encounters can reveal the histories, desires, tensions, and social conditions that animate collective life. The project grew from our engagement with public pedagogy and asks what becomes visible when public responses themselves are treated as pedagogical and interpretive sites.
Methodological Experimentation
Public pedagogy as interpretive methodology; symptomatic reading of public encounters. This work also grew from the intellectual trajectory that included my earlier Karen Pedagogy project on privilege and social confrontation.
Publication Stage
Published (2026) — Journal of Public Pedagogies, 8, with Jake Burdick and Ralph J. McCoy.
Information Dissemination During the COVID-19 Outbreak Among Students at the Tertiary Level in Bangladesh
Situated within Bangladeshi higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic, this collaborative study examines information dissemination among tertiary-level students during an unprecedented public-health crisis. The chapter contributes to broader conversations about communication, institutional response, and higher-education governance during periods of disruption.
Methodological Experimentation
This belongs to my earlier empirical research trajectory rather than my current experimental qualitative work. I would label this simply collaborative empirical research in Bangladeshi higher education rather than force a methodological-experimentation claim.
Publication Stage
Published (2023) — In Innovation, Leadership and Governance in Higher Education, Springer Nature Singapore.
This Body, That Home: (Un)Mothering in Academia
This chapter examines the maternal body as a site where home, distance, care, and academic mobility become entangled. Emerging from my larger (Un)Mothering inquiry, it considers how transnational separation is lived through embodiment rather than experienced simply as geographical distance, bringing the intimate textures of Mothering into conversation with the institutional conditions of doctoral education.
Methodological Experimentation
Embodied autoethnography; transnational Mothering as an analytic location; theorizing through the maternal body. My broader project deliberately treats embodied experience as a form of knowledge rather than merely autobiographical evidence.
Publication Stage
In Press — Brill | Sense, in Navigating Parenting During the Doctoral Journey: Affordances and Constraints in Managing Academic and Family Responsibilities.
(Un)Mothering: Vignettes of Absences on Becoming a Separated Mother in Academia
What does Motherhood become when care continues but physical presence becomes impossible? Through fragmented autoethnographic vignettes, this article conceptualizes (Un)Mothering and Separated Motherhood through absence, presence, rupture, and maternal accountability. Rather than treating separation as an individual maternal choice, the inquiry turns toward the institutional, cultural, and transnational conditions through which separation is produced and lived.
Methodological Experimentation
Fragmented critical autoethnography. Rather than constructing one seamless autobiographical account, the manuscript uses vignettes of separation as analytical interruptions through which lived experience and structural critique encounter one another.
Publication Stage
Revise & Resubmit — Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, University of California Press.
Mother Center as Matricentric Call to Action: An (Un)Mother’s “Gibberish” from Her Autoethnographic Exhibition
Emerging from my nine-station performative autoethnographic exhibition, this article asks what might happen if critique of universities' treatment of Mothers became an invitation to imagine institutions otherwise. The Mother Center develops as a speculative, care-centered university model addressing caregiving, institutional inequality, immigration, and access while moving (Un)Mothering from documentation toward institutional possibility.
Methodological Experimentation
Exhibition as methodology; Speculative Literature Encounter; autoethnography moving into public encounter and collective imagination. The larger exhibition brought photographs, institutional documents, artifacts, sound, poetry, and audience encounters together as methodological and analytical forms.
Publication Stage
Revise & Resubmit — Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, Demeter Press.
ডালিম কুমার / Prince Pomegranate from ঠাকুরমার ঝুলি / Thakurmar Jhuli / Grandma’s Bag of Tales: Storying the Discipline of Women in Bangladeshi Folklore
Returning to the Bangladeshi folktales of Thakurmar Jhuli, this chapter explores how stories remembered across childhood and adulthood participate in teaching gender, femininity, obedience, and the disciplining of women. Rather than translating the story cleanly into an English academic object, the work keeps Bangla language, memory, cultural inheritance, and differently aged selves in conversation.
Methodological Experimentation
Decolonial storying; bilingual writing; folklore as cultural archive; dialogic encounters among differently aged selves; disruption of linear temporality. My research statement identifies this project as an experiment with Bangla alongside English, folklore, memory, temporality, and differently aged selves.
Publication Stage
Under Review — Book Chapter — The Palgrave Handbook of Sankofa: Storying as Indigenous and Decolonial Research.
The Trial of the Mighty Elephant: Automythography of an (Un)Mother
A Mother becomes an elephant and intimate judgment becomes a trial. Through allegory, satire, and automythographic storytelling, this manuscript re-stories patriarchal judgment surrounding Motherhood, gender, family, and disobedience. Animal characters create enough imaginative distance to tell a painful story differently while retaining the cultural and gendered structures that make the trial recognizable.
Methodological Experimentation
Automythography — blending autobiographical experience, mythic storytelling, allegory, theatricality, and satire. The transformation of lived actors into symbolic characters deliberately troubles the boundary between autobiography and fiction.
Publication Stage
Under Review — Book Chapter/Creative Scholarly Manuscript — Once Upon a Time, a Mother…, edited by Victoria Bailey and Vanessa Marr, Demeter Press.
The Ugly Maternal Body: Thinking with Abjection
This project asks what becomes knowable when the maternal body is not cleaned up for academic representation. Thinking with abjection, it examines bodily fragmentation, reproductive labor, visual injustice, and the cultural politics through which maternal bodies become desirable, excessive, unruly, or “ugly.” Rather than treating the body as an object awaiting interpretation, bodily fragments become material with which theory itself is produced.
Methodological Experimentation
Post-qualitative thinking-with rather than conventional coding. Bodily fragments function as theoretical and material provocations rather than stable data awaiting thematic categorization.
Publication Stage
Abstract Accepted / Book Chapter in Preparation — The Routledge International Handbook of Post-Qualitative and New Approaches to Inquiry with Dr. Shalin Raye.
Musical Misogyny: Gender Violence and Bollywood
This project investigates how misogyny, objectification, gendered violence, and romantic pursuit circulate through Bollywood popular music and how audiences interpret these representations. Bringing cultural texts into conversation with participant accounts, the study asks how popular entertainment may participate in normalizing, contesting, or making visible gendered scripts within South Asian cultural life.
Methodological Experimentation
Media/textual analysis brought into conversation with participant accounts rather than treating popular culture as a closed text. The project represents my movement between cultural analysis and qualitative interpretation.
Publication Stage
Manuscript in Preparation — currently identified for Journal of Language, Identity & Education. The project was previously presented at the International Conference on Literacy, Culture, and Language Education.
The Hidden Curriculum of the “Good Mother”: Faux Foucauldian Care and (Un)Mothering of International Mother-Scholars in Higher Education
This manuscript turns toward the hidden curriculum of “good” Motherhood and asks how international MotherScholars encounter competing expectations of academic productivity, mobility, presence, sacrifice, and care. Using (Un)Mothering to trouble individualized narratives of maternal responsibility, the project considers how institutions and gendered cultural expectations participate in producing the conditions under which Mothers are judged.
Methodological Experimentation
Foucauldian-inspired conceptual inquiry placed in conversation with autoethnographic and feminist analysis; hidden curriculum becomes a way of reading maternal expectations beyond formal institutional policy.
Publication Stage
Manuscript in Preparation — intended for Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.
(Re)Mothering: Reconstructing Maternal Identity Post-Transnational Separation
If (Un)Mothering examines separation, (Re)Mothering asks what happens after physical proximity returns. The project explores maternal identity, care, space, embodiment, and relationship after prolonged transnational separation, refusing the assumption that reunification simply restores an earlier Mother-child relationship. Instead, it approaches reunion as another process of becoming.
Methodological Experimentation
Longitudinal self-inquiry combining reflective writing, spatial and visual materials, everyday encounters, and arts-based forms to examine Mothering as an ongoing relational process rather than a stable identity.
Publication Stage
Manuscript in Preparation — intended for the special issue Routes & Rootes: Transnational Genealogies of Art Education, International Journal of Education Through Art.
The Hidden Curriculum of AI Grammar Correction: Standard English, Multilingual Students, and Linguistic Agency
This collaborative project examines what happens when AI grammar correction encounters multilingual academic writing. It asks how seemingly neutral correction technologies may reproduce assumptions about Standard English while shaping multilingual students’ linguistic agency. The project treats grammar correction not merely as a technical convenience but as a pedagogical space where language, authority, belonging, and legitimacy are negotiated.
Methodological Experimentation
Collaborative critical inquiry into AI and language, using hidden curriculum as a conceptual lens for examining the norms embedded within apparently technical acts of correction.
Publication Stage
Manuscript publicly available / under review — with Samarnh Pang and Panha Song; SSRN preprint dated July 15, 2026.
Teaching Global Education Through Collaborative Autoethnography: Possibilities and Tensions in a University Seminar
This project examines what happens when students in a Global Studies Seminar move from learning about culture and global difference toward examining how they themselves are situated within them. Through collaborative autoethnographic work, students connect personal histories and experiences with broader cultural and structural questions, while the study also attends to the tensions and ethical complexities of inviting lived experience into university coursework.
Methodological Experimentation
Collaborative autoethnography as both pedagogy and inquiry. The project experiments with collapsing the conventional separation between course assignment, reflective learning, and collaborative knowledge production.
Publication Stage
Manuscript in Preparation — for the 2026 special issue on Autoethnographic Education, Journal of Educational Research and Innovation. An earlier version was presented as “From Reflection to Collective Knowledge: Re-architecting a 1-Credit Global Studies Seminar through Collaborative Autoethnography.”