With more than twelve years of expertise as a researcher and a development practitioner, Ashika Niraula has expertise in the issues of migration, development, inequalities, social change, inclusion, gender, and qualitative research. Ashika’s research interest includes exploring diverse and complex migrant biographies and in particular, how migrants story their life trajectories as they move across the national, social, and cultural borders. Her research broadly investigates migrant’s decision-making, identity formation, agency, social determinants of health, settlement, integration, networks and political activism.
Ashika holds a Ph.D. degree in Educational Anthropology from Aarhus University in Denmark, with a focus on highly educated migrants and their encounters with Danish institutions. In her Ph.D. project, she examined the ways highly educated migrants reflected upon their encounters with the Danish immigration authorities, the Danish labor market, and the Danish society, and how they talked about such encounters shaping their understanding of being a ‘highly skilled’ migrant. She completed her MPhil degree in Gender and Development from the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Master’s degree in Rural Development from Tribhuvan University, Nepal.
In her current Postdoctoral project, Ashika explores the drivers of international highly skilled migration and how the pandemic has affected the decision-making of prospective highly skilled migrants in a disrupted and uncertain COVID19 world. Ashika also worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in an interdisciplinary project on immigrant settlement and social determinants of health in rural Canada at the University of Toronto Mississauga. As a Research Associate, she was involved in a project on Indian female migrants in Canada during the COVID 19 pandemic at the University of Guelph. She also taught as a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada (Migration and Health course), and at Aarhus University, Denmark (Anthropology of Education and Globalization course). Ashika has prior experience working as a Research Assistant at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Aarhus University, Denmark.
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