Sowmya Ramanathan
Sowmya Ramanathan is a visiting faculty member of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at William & Mary. As a researcher and educator, her work makes transnational connections between feminist theories and cultural practices in the 20th and 21st century Americas. She adopts a hemispheric approach to studying the role of the body, narrative, and culture in movements for social change, especially those led by women of color. Working at the intersections of cultural studies, feminist theory and practice, and community psychology, Sowmya’s work stresses the importance of theory as a pragmatic tool that can help us envision new ways to negotiate embodiment, emotion, conflict, identity, community, and the future in movement-building.
Her current book project, The Stories We Tell: Visionary Feminism and Narrative Change, examines the role narrative plays in movements for lasting psychological, social, and political change. From México to Argentina, the United States, Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia, The Stories We Tell is conceived as a theoretical guide and a pragmatic tool that can help those who are grappling with ways to name and understand power, evaluate dominant narratives, build a narrative ecosystem, frame and craft impactful messaging, manage conflict, and incorporate aspirational, imaginative, and creative visions into the struggle for collective wellbeing. In addition to this, Sowmya’s academic research has been featured in peer-reviewed publications such as Lexington Books’s Intersectional Feminism in the Age of Transnational Feminism (eds. Bezhanova and Amador) and the UNAM and University of Guanajuato’s Las palabras y los días. Women in the Latin American Press. She has also worked adjacently with the Center for Evaluation Innovation to advise for the incorporation of humanities methodologies in current learning & evaluation practices.
As a first-generation North American-Tamil woman growing up in North America, her pursuit of a PhD in Spanish & Portuguese (Princeton University, 2021) manifested as part of a lifelong journey to reconcile the distinct and contradictory aspects of self. This has informed her practice of linguistic, cultural, conceptual, and spiritual border-crossing and continues to undergird her defense of the in-betweens, grey areas, and zones of indeterminacy that give life meaning.