Laavanya Kathiravelu is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Before joining NTU, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. She also serves on board of HOME, a non-profit organization, which deals with welfare of low wage migrant workers. While growing up in Singapore, she had normalized the hierarchies and divisions that we see around us and taken it for granted. Her graduate education overseas acted as a catalyst for her to question her assumptions and started understanding the lives of low wage migrant in Singapore. This resulted in her first book ‘Migrant Dubai: low wage workers and the construction of a Global City’ (Palgrave Macmillian 2016). She hopes her work with the issues of migration, ethnicity and cities will be able to humanize the anonymous bodies of migrants who live and contribute to the greater inclusion of them within Singapore society.
