December 2024 - February 2025
Chamathka D. P. Kariyawasam is a Senior Lecturer (Transitional) at the Department of So-ciology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is PhD Fellow at the University of Edin-burgh, United Kingdom, and a recipient of a UK Commonwealth Scholarship. She received her BA from University of Colombo and she completed her MA in Sociology at University of Waterloo, Canada.
Her PhD research is in the area of mobility studies and focuses on family travel practices in Sri Lanka. It seeks to uncover the understandings and practices of family leisure travel among Sri Lankan families and specifically attempts to explore what families seek when engaging in travel practices, to understand the effects of denaturalisation of interactions which travel could produce, and to uncover how the family holiday can be seen as a time of mutual attentiveness. The research focuses on two seaside urban leisure spaces with colonial historical significance, that have now become recreational sites for local and for-eign tourists in urban cities in Sri Lanka : The Galle Fort, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Galle, Sri Lanka and the Galle Face Green, the largest open space in the capital city of Colombo. The study draws on phenomenological traditions in its theoretical orientation.
Urban leisure practices in the wetland capital city of Colombo in Sri Lanka
Chamathka has been awarded a SSHN Scholarship by the French Embassy of Sri Lanka funding a two and a half month research stay at CESSMA to start developing a new re-search project on ‘Urban leisure practices in the only wetland capital in the world : Colom-bo, Sri Lanka.’ The research project would interrogate the interaction between class, envi-ronmentalism and urban leisure in Colombo. Specifically focusing on how the conception of the urban dwellers’ environment connect to their sense of place and of belonging to the city.
In 2023, Chamathka was awarded a travel grant from the French Embassy in Sri Lanka to attend the 2nd Social Sciences Winter School in Karachi, Pakistan, jointly organised by the Centre for South Asian Studies in Paris (CEIAS, CNRS-EHESS) and the Institute of Business Administration Karachi (IBA).