Background

Pavithra Nandanan Menon hails from the city of Kochi in Kerala, a state in Southern India. Prior to joining NUS, Pavithra was working as a Consultant in Mumbai with KPMG (2016-18), India and providing technical assistance to the Department of Social Justice and Special Assistance, Government of Maharashtra in policy evaluation and implementation, drafting reports on social development issues, researching and recommending best practices for educational reforms etc. She completed her undergraduate degree - B.A. in English Literature and Communication Studies in 2012 and continued to pursue her first postgraduate degree - M.A. in English Language and Literature, both from St. Teresa’s College, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India from 2012 to 2014. During this period, she also worked as a trainer in communication and vocational skills for under-privileged children and women at an NGO her hometown. She was also a guest faculty for a brief period at SH School of Communication training graduate students in communication skills. She pursued her second postgraduate degree - M.Sc. in Gender, Development and Globalisation from LSE (2015-16).

Asian Languages

Pavithra has an advanced proficiency in Hindi and Malayalam, and a working level proficiency in Tamil. She looks forward to taking up a Southeast Asian language to support her research.

Research Interests

Her broad areas of interest have always been race and ethnicity, feminism, colourism, intersectionality, casteism etc. During her academic journey in Comparative Asian Studies Programme at NUS, she looks forward to do her doctoral research around her question ‘How does skin colour act as a social capital for women’, with a comparative study of women in India and other countries in Southeast Asia. This has been inspired from Margaret Hunter’s conceptualisation of “skin colour as a social capital”. Skin colour discrimination is deeply connected with gender, class, caste, status and other social intersections and the discriminations arising from it. Lighter skin tone is often associated with beauty and femininity. Being a Pan-Asian topic she aims to answer this, by looking into the epidermal politics of skin lightening commercials, matrimonial advertisements, analysing the same element in movies and lyrics and popular culture from an intersectional perspective and gauge how this dark obsession for fair skin effects the development of women.