Nalika Gajaweera
Biography
Nalika Gajaweera is a cultural anthropologist whose work bridges academic research, community engagement and public scholarship. Her expertise centers on the intersections of religion, race, gender, ethics and social justice, with research conducted in Sri Lanka and the United States.
She is Assistant Director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine, returning after a decade as Senior Research Analyst at USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, where she managed global projects on organizational change and faith-based community power-building and led the “Transforming the American Sangha” project.
Her forthcoming book under advanced contract with Rutgers University Press, Transforming the American Sangha: Dismantling the Institutional Whiteness of Insight, draws on three years of ethnographic research to examine how institutional whiteness shapes practices, policies, and cultural norms within the Buddhist Insight meditation tradition, and highlights the often invisibilized labor of BIPOC practitioners working to reimagine Insight institutions beyond these structures.
Nalika maintains one foot in academic administration and another in research, writing and teaching, including courses in Ethnic Studies at Saddleback Community College in Orange County, California.