Bindhulakshmi Pattadath

Bindhulakshmi Pattadath is a postdoctoral fellow at Amsterdam School for Social Science Research as a part of a larger research project Illegal but Licit: Transnational flows and permissive polities in Asia (Funded by NWO/WOTRO).

Bindhulakshmi has received a PhD from Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay (India) with a dissertation entitled 'Women and Mental Illness: An Ethnographic Study in Kerala’ in which she explored the everyday lives of Kerala women who have been diagnosed as mentally ill within the bio-medical paradigm of modern psychiatry. Her ethnographic focus has always been on Kerala, a South West coastal state of India with a special emphasis on women's everyday lives. She also holds an MA and MPhil in Anthropology from Kannur university and University of Hyderabad.

In the current postdoctoral research she investigates the labour narratives of migrant women domestic workers from Kerala to Dubai and tries to understand the ways in which women deal with legal and illegal systems in which they are embedded as transnational migrants.