Hi! I’m Associate Professor Sukhmani Khorana
a public scholar, writer, educator and media commentator
ABOUT ME
My work sits at the intersection of research, public engagement & social change.
New Book
Mediated Emotions of Migration
This book unpacks how emotions and affect are key conceptual lenses for understanding contemporary processes and discourses around migration.
Drawing on empirical research, grassroots projects with migrants and refugees, and mediated stories of migration and asylum seeking from the Global North, the book sheds light on the affects of empathy, aspiration and belonging to reveal how they can be harnessed as public emotions of positive collective change.
In the face of increasing precariousness, Khorana calls for uncovering the potential of these affects in order to build new forms of care and solidarities across differences, and in the wake of intersecting global crises.
CONTENTS
Feelings and migrants come and go, and some stay/stick.
- Empathy
- Aspiration
- Belonging
Published
Dec 22, 2022Page count
176 pagesISBN
978-1529218237
Dimensions
234 x 156 mm
Imprint
Bristol University Press
The Tastes & Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia
Dr. Sukhmani Khorana
In the 21st century, an accelerated pace of global movements of people, goods, capital, technology and ideas has led to ambivalence regarding cultural identity for individuals, as well as collectives like neighbourhoods and cities. While the preparation, availability and consumption of diverse foods have become symbolic of the very openness of a place, there are concerns that this is only reflective of a superficial and consumerist form of middle class cosmopolitanism.
Reviews
Food has always been central to how we live together and, as this book acutely shows, how we become more than who we are. Eschewing a superficial white, middle class cosmopolitanism for an understanding of cosmopolitanisation as process, Sukhmani Khorana cleverly examines, across a range of sites, the way food is central to everyday intercultural politics – and gender and class – in Australia. This offers, she argues, the possibility for a critical, resistant conviviality and a more ethical way of living in diversity. This is a must read for all cosmo-multiculturalists!
This is a lively and engaging book which brings together fresh thinking on the importance of multi-ethnic food in popular culture and everyday life in Australia. Importantly, Sukhmani Khorana interrogates the political consequences and power dynamics of celebratory cultural consumption through food, as well as the possibilities for connection and transformation.
This insightful and eminently readable book provides a timely academic excursion across the Australian intercultural food landscape. Traversing the substantial body of scholarly literature about intercultural food politics, Dr Sukhmani Khorana takes the reader on a tantalising culinary tour across Australian TV food shows, food blogs, food markets and food social enterprises.
In bringing together academic thinking, personal memories and multi-method research, we finally have a book that offers an engaging and provocative intervention into the hoary seesaw debate about ‘eating the Other’ in food studies. The real strength of this lively book is that Dr Khorana decentres the white ‘food adventurer’. Providing a fresh contribution not only to food studies but also intercultural studies, Khorana’s analysis will inspire important new trajectories for future researchers in a range of disciplines.
This valuable and timely book offers a profoundly nuanced examination of the complex, messy everyday experience of ‘cosmopolitan becomings’—an ongoing process in the (un)making—as revealed through the highly-charged lens of vernacular experiences of food. Across the broad contemporary Australian landscape of food production and consumption – from farmers’ markets, through to food trucks, refuge social enterprises, reality television cooking shows and suburban Indian and South Asian grocery stores – it looks to the ethical possibilities for positive encounter, while always being profoundly attentive to how our engagements with food conviviality are highly charged by the intersectionallity of our belongings.
Updates
Updates about talks & media commentaries
Talks
Geomedia 2023
Digital Geographies of Hope by Tampere University
Media Narratives on Displacement
The final in the four-part series on mobility, displacement and refugees in South Asia by the Asia Society.
July 19 2023, Online
WSU PANEL 2A SEAT AT THE TABLE
A Seat at the Table explores the role of food as the cornerstone of a multicultural society. Speakers will examine how food raises critical questions around production, consumption and identity. The modern Australian diet is built on a multiplicity of traditions, but does this mean that everyone gets a seat at the table?
WSU Engineering and Innovation Hub
17 September, 3.15 – 4pm
Media Commentary
Link: https://t.co/WXC2nDVXjv
— SYOK Podcast (@SYOKpodcast) May 25, 2022
Australians not only chose a new governmentt recently but also a new set of priorities by giving more voice to women, minorities & climate issues, with Dr. Sukhmani Khorana, talked about politics Down Under.#SYOK #SYOKPodcast #AWANI pic.twitter.com/1R2EP3pqWU