SICASH 2021 – Keynotes

Dr. Siri Gamage started his academic career as a probationary assistant lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Peradeniya in 1974.  Between 1977-80 he was at University of Hawaii,Manoa,Honolulu reading for a  Master’s degree in Sociology while being affiliated with the East-West Centre. He served the Department as a Senior lecturer until October 1986 when he proceeded to Monash University, Australia to pursue a doctoral degree in Social Anthropology.  For his PhD, he did field research in a Kandyan village (1984-85).  After submitting his PhD thesis he accepted a Lecturer position in Multicultural Studies at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia, primarily due to the inability to return to home country in 1989 due to the political violence prevailing in the country during that period. Between 1990 -2018 he served at the University of New England as a Lecturer and a Senior lecturer.  During his tenure at the University of New England, he served at the School of Professional Studies and the School of Education, and contributed to both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Professional Studies, and Education from a sociological and critical social justice perspective. Intercultural Education, Globalisation, Education and Work, Cultural Diversity and Education, Migration and Identity issues were some of the focus areas in teaching.

His research profile features a significant number of publications some focusing on Sri Lanka. He has also presented many papers at various national and international conferences, and has supervised numerous postgraduate students.

During 2019-20 Dr. Gamage served as an Adjunct Associate Professor of the School of Social Science and Psychology, Western Sydney University. In the last 5 years he has turned his attention to knowledge production in social sciences as he is concerned about theEurocentric/Ameri-centric nature of existing knowledge and the exclusion/erasure/marginalisation of local/indigenous knowledge in the way Social sciences are practiced in the former colonies of the global south.  Following Southern Theory movement-a collection of intellectuals concerned about the situation – he has taken a proactive role in pursuing options for constructing autonomous, grounded and locally relevant theories, concepts, orientations to knowledge used in  Higher Education institutions.  He coordinates several internet based groups for the same purpose and has published journal articles and book chapters on the subject.

James J. Cochran Is the Rogers-Spivey Fellow and Associate Dean for Research with the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business. He has been a Visiting Scholar with Stanford University, the University of South Africa, the Universidad de Talca, Pôle Universitaire Léonard De Vinci, the University of Limpopo, and the University of Namibia. He holds honorary faculty appointments with the University of KwaZulu Natal and the University of Limpopo.

Dr. Cochran’s research focuses on problems at the interface of statistics and operations research, and he has taught a wide range of statistics and operations courses from the introductory undergraduate level through PhD seminars. He has published fourteen book chapters and over fifty research articles, and he is coauthor of eight textbooks in statistics, operations research, analytics, and data visualization. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Wiley Series in Operations Research and Management Science, Oxford Anthology of Statistics in Sports series, and INFORMS Analytics Body of Knowledge. He has served as a consultant to a wide variety of corporations, government agencies, and not-for-profit organizations around the world.

Dr. Cochran established an international teaching effectiveness colloquium series and organized these events in Uruguay, South Africa, Colombia, India, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Nepal, Cameroon, Croatia, Cuba (twice), Estonia, Fiji, Mongolia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Tunisia, and Grenada. He was a founding co-chair of Statistics without Borders and a founding committee member for the INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics initiative. He has delivered keynotes to conferences in twenty-five nations.

Dr. Cochran has received the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award, Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award, and Karl E. Peace Award for outstanding statistical contributions for the betterment of society. He is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association and INFORMS, and he has received both the American Statistical Association’s Founders Award and the INFORMS President’s Award.

Dr Bimali Indrarathne is a researcher in applied linguistics, and she currently works in the Department of Education, University of York, United Kingdom. She started her career as an English language teacher in Sri Lanka and then worked at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka. Before joining York, she also worked at King’s College London and Lancaster University, UK. Dr Indrarathne has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and a Master’s in TESOL, both from Lancaster University. She obtained her bachelor’s degree from Peradeniya University and Master’s in Linguistics degree from Kelaniya University. She also holds Cambridge DELTA and CELTA.

Dr Indrarathne’s main research interest is second language acquisition. She’s currently involved in a replication study under SLA for All? initiative and a project on event realization in Sinhala learners of English. She has run several research and teacher training projects in Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan on English language teaching materials designing, dyslexia and inclusive practices and English for Academic Purposes. Dr Indrarathne has published in reputed journals in the field and has been a plenary speaker in conferences such as TESOL Greece Specific Learning Differences Colloquium, 20th National RESC Conference in Sri Lanka, British Council’s SLELTEC Conference, International Research Conference of KDU and National Action Research Conference in Higher Education organized by Sri Jayawardenepura University. She has also been an invited speaker at several institutions and a regular speaker at international conferences such as American Association for Applied Linguistics, EUROSLA, and ITEFL. She is a consultant of Commonwealth of Learning, Canada and works with the Ministry of Education, Sri Lanka on school-based teacher development projects and online teaching initiatives.

Jeanne Marecek came to Sri Lanka in 1988 as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Peradeniya. She returned to the University of Peradeniya in 1991 as a USIS lecturer. She has regularly returned to Sri Lanka since then. She has supervised PhD students at Peradeniya Medical Faculty and Ruhuna Medical faculty and MPhil. students at the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Colombo. She has also worked with community health workers at Nest and with psychosocial practitioners working in communities affected by the war and the 2004 tsunami.

Jeanne’s research concerns the cultural meanings and social structures that shape people’s everyday life, as well as their experiences of psychological distress. She has been especially interested in the ways that gender ideologies shape the identities and experiences of adolescents and adults. She is the co-author of Gender and Culture: Theories and Practices (Cambridge) and co-editor of Gender, Sex, and Sexualities: Psychological Perspectives (Oxford). She is an editor of Feminism & Psychology, an international journal of critical feminist scholarship. Her research mainly draws on qualitative methods, such as narrative and discursive approaches, which enable researchers to examine the cultural frames of reference people use to make sense of themselves and others. She is the co-author of Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research (Cambridge). In Sri Lanka, she has worked alongside psychologists to understand the factors underlying the persisting high incidence of deliberate self-harm and suicide-like acts, especially among adolescents and young adults.

She holds an MSc and a PhD in Social and Clinical Psychology from Yale University (USA), as well as a BSc in Psychology from Loyola University (USA). She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) and Guest Professor at Umeå University (Sweden). She has also been a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She was president of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology in the US and president of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies.