Estelle Keerthana Ramaswamy

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT ESTELLE KEERTHANA RAMASWAMY

Estelle Keerthana Ramaswamy (she/they) is an Indigenous/First Nations Tamil Thirunangai (transfemme & nonbinary in Anglo- terms) researcher and a social scientist. She is currently a PhD researcher at the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA) at the prestigious University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. She is the first non-binary woman of trans experience from India to be awarded the prestigious RTP(International) PhD scholarship by the Australian Government and the UNSW Sydney. Her PhD explores trans and gender diverse (TGD) people’s experiences of gender-based violence (GBV) in Australia and India. She works with Drs. Joyce Wu and Maree Higgins and Professor Anthony Zwi.Estelle Keerthana was recently a Sessional Lecturer in Community Services and Social Work at the Crown Institute of Higher Education (CIHE), Australia. She is also an Associate with the UNSW Australian Human Rights Institute and a Member of the UNSW Gendered Violence Student Reference Group (SRG) and the UNSW CoPQTI. She founded Ardham which was a collective of trans and gender diverse individuals that worked for the empowerment of underprivileged and underserved communities especially the trans and gender diverse (TGD) communities. Finally, she was the Chief Editor for Ecopreneur India and has reviewed for many academic journals. Estelle Keerthana engaged in community engagement through Ardham by conducting training or sensitivity sessions or workshops on gender from a trans-feminist perspective. She was part of the Gender Equality Taskforce (GET) for the City of Casey (Victoria, Australia) and Community Reference Group at the Victorian Pride Centre (Melbourne, Australia). They are an alumna (we need to find a gender neutral equivalent) of RGNIYD (Government of India) where they pursued an MA in Development Policy and Practice after a BSc in Psychology from the University of Madras. They were a \'RUSA 2.0 Social Sciences Project Fellow\' with the Department of Women’s Studies @Bharathidasan University. Prior to these, they were an edupreneur between 20••••16 @Scholarclips International Education, promoting international education. They are proficient in six languages including German and French. They are always looking to network with new people. They are also interested in collaborating on research projects that has a focus on gender/sexuality and any subject area that would be of mutual interest and benefit.Specialties: LGBTIQA+|| Health || Education || Climate Change || Living Experience || Decolonial Methods || Gender-based Violence