Welcome to My Corner of the Internet
Thinking about language, literacy, and the unequal structures that shape who gets heard is my second nature.
My work in TESOL, writing centers, and first-year writing classrooms has taught me that writing is never simply an individual skill. Language carries histories of migration, class, caste, race, gender, colonialism, and aspiration. To teach writing, then, is also to confront assumptions that determine which language or, if English, then which English is usually rewarded, which accents are tolerated, and which forms of expression are treated as default legitimate.
My website grows out of those concerns!
Growing up in India, I moved through English both intimately and critically. English has been a language of access, employment, academic belonging, and creative possibility for me in India. It has also been a language through which authority is measured and unevenly distributed. I am interested in what happens when people inhabit English without fully surrendering themselves to its institutional demands.
Much of my thinking emerges from working with multilingual writers as a multilingual global anglophone queer writer from India in the US Higher Education. In writing centers and classrooms, I have seen students treated as deficient when they were, in fact, navigating extraordinarily complex linguistic worlds. I have also seen how transformative it can be when writing pedagogy creates room for experimentation, uncertainty, and multiple literacies rather than enforcing a narrow performance of correctness.
I care deeply about pedagogical practices that resist gatekeeping. Be it tutoring or teaching, I am interested in learning about pedagogies that make space for hesitation, translation, code-switching, affect, and vulnerability. My interest in the above matters grew during my my decade long career. I have not come across any of my students who ever arrive as empty bodies waiting to be filled with academic discourse, especially multilingual writers. They arrive already carrying languages, histories, and rhetorical knowledge that institutions often fail to recognize.
I do not see my professional and personal lives as separate. Instead, they blend quotes often. My relationship to writing has also been shaped by my queer life in India and the US, by online and transnational scholar professional communities I am part of, by cultural movement across borders I make, and through those, the negotiations I am often involved in as I inhabit multiple worlds at once. Questions that emerge in classrooms often continue into friendships, media, memory, intimacy, everyday survival, and the archive. In my research, I often acknowledge these continuities rather than conceal them.
This website will offer many things about me: my reflections on writing studies and pedagogy, writing center resources, my unpublished notes on multilingualism and global English, thoughts on cultures, fragments of criticism, unfinished questions, and attempts to think publicly about language and power without pretending to stand outside them.
More than anything, I want this website to become a space of conversation and ongoing learning who are eager to talk, invest, and care for me.
If you are here from writing studies, TESOL, writing center work, or education more broadly: welcome!
If you are here because our lives overlap elsewhere, welcome as well!
Send me a message by filling out the form at the bottom of the website.
Thank you for reading, and I am looking forward to our beginning.
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