Dr. Jegathesan is a cultural anthropologist with a research focus on gender, labor, minority politics, and development in the Global South and specifically Sri Lanka and South Asia. Her research has focused on the social and economic experiences of Tamil tea plantation residents and workers in Sri Lanka, where she has conducted field research since 2005. She is currently researching the first women's trade union in Sri Lanka, the dynamics of transnational organizing across formal and informal employment sectors, plantation sustainability practices, and the changing development practices of local plantation NGOs in postwar Sri Lanka. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, American Association for University Women, and American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. She has published in Dialectical Anthropology, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and HimalSouthasian, and is co-founder of Lanka Solidarity, a scholarly activist collective that educateS and informS policy, state, international, and community leaders and actors about the sociopolitical and economic issues of post-war Sri Lanka.