Author name: Hasini Lecamwasam

The classroom is believed to be a site that nourishes scholarship, diversity, creativity and dissent. It should facilitate students and teachers of diverse genders and sexual preferences to live out their identities, if they wish to, without hindrance. However, in reality, the classroom, in Sri Lanka, remains a microcosm of the larger society and often re-produces the social hierarchies of gender and sexuality. One’s body, expressions and desires are policed heavily in this space through unwritten codes of conduct entrenched in discourses of gender and sexual normativity. Today’s Kuppi Talk explores how the classroom in the Sri Lankan context remains a space that marginalizes women and LGBTIQ+ persons and what needs to be done to make this space more inclusive.

Last week’s Kuppi column, by Kaushalya Perera, focused on labour concerns at state universities and the impact of measures taken by the government on the recruitment and retention of academic staff. In this article, I specifically draw attention to the factors that affect attracting and retaining young lecturers and their career development in the state university system, especially at a time of economic crisis. To do this, I will use my own experiences and those of junior lecturers in the medical and dental fields with whom I have had conversations across several state universities.

A couple of years back, at a workshop on graduate employability (sponsored by World Bank loans), we were told that producing graduates was like producing cars. The buyers – potential employers – want to know what they are getting. Let’s consider this analogy at face value. We would then remember that the quality of a car depends on not one but multiple things, of which labour is a significant issue, as the Michigan automobile industry realized last year.