Rate My Professor Samanthi Gunawardana

Samanthi J. Gunawardana is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Development in the School of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. She earned her PhD in Economics and Commerce from the University of Melbourne. Before joining Monash, she was a Lecturer in Employment Relations at Griffith University and an Instructor in Labour Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She also held prestigious visiting roles, including the 2009-2010 McGill Visiting Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut and a 2006 Visiting International Fellow at Cornell University. At Monash, Gunawardana served as Course Director for the Master of International Development Practice from 2013 to 2022. She was a Steering Committee member of the Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre from 2016 to 2023 and currently sits on the Steering Committee of the Monash Global Peace and Security Centre. She has delivered public lectures, such as the Inaugural Victor Melder Lecture on Histories of Sri Lankan Migration to Australia in 2022 and served as a panel discussant at the book launch of Gendered States Revisited in 2018.

Gunawardana's research examines the impact of development policy on employment systems, labour, and livelihoods among rural women in South Asia, particularly emphasizing gender, labour, and the effects of conflict in Sri Lanka. Her work covers export processing zone employment systems, agrarian labour, the impact of conflict, freedom of association, labour organizing, labour migration, microfinance and debt, entrepreneurship, and connections between the political economy of households and development policy. Current projects focus on possibilities for decentering and decolonising cross-border partnerships, alliances, and collaborations. Her specializations include international political economy, gender, labour force, developing countries, worker's rights, human rights, decolonisation, ethical sourcing, feminist political economy, livelihoods, Sri Lanka, economic security, employment relations, and entrepreneurship. She has received the Australian International Political Economy Network Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize in 2016 and the Faculty of Arts Citation for Excellence in Post-Graduate Coursework Teaching in 2017. Key publications include 'Caring ways of resistance in postwar Sri Lanka' (2025, Security Dialogue), 'Teaching the International Political Economy (IPE) of everyday life through global groupwork' (2025, Review of International Political Economy), 'Exogenous crises and Australia's development policy' (2024, Routledge), 'Covid-19 and the international political economy of everyday life: An introduction to the special issue' (2023, Reinvention), and 'Labour and work: Roundtable: Is increased automation the solution to global labour exploitation?' (2023, Oxford University Press). Gunawardana accepts PhD students on topics related to cross-border and transnational social movements, including labour movements, women's rights, and grassroots peace organisations.