Dr Senel Wanniarachchi

Dr Senel Wanniarachchi is an interdisciplinary scholar concerned with how colonialism and ethnonationalism shape race, gender, sexuality & ethnicity.

Senel’s scholarship is concerned with the relationships between historical and ongoing forms of colonialism and postcolonial nationalism, and how these relationships shape formations such as race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

He is currently developing his book manuscript Theory Amidst Loot — The Afterlives of Sri Lankan Artefacts in British Museums which examines a series of artefacts with relationships to Sri Lanka in various British museums. The book asks how their materialities and histories can inform and complicate existing historical and theoretical work on postcolonialism and decoloniality. It also sheds light on how debates around colonial theft and restitution connect not only to historical and ongoing forms of colonialism but also to a range of issues such as postcolonial ethnonationalism in South Asia and the intensification of anti-migrant and anti-trans politics in the West.

He has published in, among other outlets, Cultural Politics, Signs, Geographical Research and the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Sri Lanka.

He completed his PhD at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and was subsequently an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford.

In Sri Lanka, Senel co-founded Hashtag Generation, an activist organisation working at the intersection of human rights and technology.

Senel is an interdisciplinary social scientist and theorist working on Sri Lanka and the wider South Asian region in relation to a range of themes including gender, sexuality, caste, cultural politics, colonial memory and postcolonial (ethno)nationalism. He is interested in how discourses of “culture” and “heritage” appear in colonial archives and persist in contemporary contexts, including digital archives. He is interested in how these narratives are used in frameworks that are anti-imperialist yet simultaneously ethnonationalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative. 

A related and ongoing research avenue examines how technology-mediated spaces function simultaneously as sites of injury and violence and as spaces of possibility and resistance for minoritised subjects and social movements in postcolonial South Asia. In engaging in research for this avenue, he draws on his experiences with Hashtag Generation, a social justice organisation which he founded in Sri Lanka.