I am a researcher-writer whose scholarship courts the edges of language, memory, and agency in postcolonial terrains. My work evinces an abiding preoccupation with the quiet and oft invisible granular expressions of agency, particularly among communities who live and labour beneath the weight of colonial hangovers and narrow metrics of productivity and proficiency. I seek to surface the vernacular tactics and in/corporeal practices through which people negotiate, subvert, and reconfigure imposed hierarchies, illuminating how quotidian gestures of resistance and creativity carve out spaces of solidarity, dignity, and alternative becoming in the interstices of dominant regimes.
Animating my research is a persistent curiosity and commitment to tracing how knowledge is constructed, claimed, and contested within diverse socio-political and cultural contexts. I draw sustenance from de/postcolonial thinkers and writers who write against the grain; interrogating the power-laden structures of language and culture and forging pathways towards more democratic and emancipatory modes of knowledge and social practice. I work in concert with artists, activists, communities, and creative practitioners to reimagine research as a shared inheritance and cultivate contemplative, critical, and convivial articulations with the architectures of our social worlds.
Prior to coming to Oxford, I worked in teacher education with the Malaysian Ministry of Education, where I trained in-service English language teachers, designed and developed face-to-face and blended language courses, edited policy blueprints, as well as wrote speeches and foreword for Ministers, including the Prime Minister, Education Minister and the Secretary General of Education. I graduated from Macquarie University, Australia, with a B.Ed in TESOL and Applied Linguistics with a minor in English Literature. I was subsequently awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach foreign languages and study Creative Writing, American Literature, and Cultural Memory, Migration and Displacement Studies at Michigan State University. I then completed dual master’s degrees; one in TESOL at the University of Nottingham and another in Educational Leadership and Management Development at the National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan.
My academic journey has spanned several countries and disciplinary homes, but each pivot has been less a reinvention than a return to the same questions, refracted differently: What does it mean to centre everyday, ancestral modes of learning and folk epistemologies within communities marginalised by colonial legacies and institutional and imposed hierarchies? What becomes of language when it is both weapon and refuge?
Alongside my research, I carry a panoply of leadership roles across academic, artistic, and institutional spheres. I currently teach Organisational Psychology and was formerly a Teaching Fellow for Comparative and International Education, Applied Linguistics, as well as Perspectives and Debates in Qualitative Research. I am at present, a Social Sciences Divisional Representative, and I also sit on the Doctoral Research Committee. I was previously the Co-President of the Oxford University Poetry Society – one of Britain’s oldest poetry societies, and the Co-Chair of the Oxford-Cambridge Exchange. I also served as the President of the Graduate Student Association at the National Chung Cheng University.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Nadarajan, D. (2025). Soul-iloquy: Time travelling with the forgotten self. In Ari Sherris & Ana Cristina Cunha da Silva (Eds.), Playing Semiotics Beyond Geontopower (In press). Cambridge University Press.
Nadarajan, D. (2023). Wraiths, rasa, and rememory: Re-Searching in the shadows of peripheral knowledge and wisdom in the quotidian. In Ari Sherris (Ed.), Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)justice, Teaching, and Scholarship: Textu(r)alities in and Beyond Applied Linguistics. Multilingual Matters.
Nadarajan, D. (2022). The zombification crisis in a crisis: Neoliberal battles and teacher survivors in the pandemic. In Wiseman, A. W. (Ed.), Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021, (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 42A), 149-157. Emerald Group Publishing.
Deygers, B., Bigelow, M., Lo Bianco, J., Nadarajan, D., & Tani, M. (2021). Low print literacy and its representation in research and policy. Language Assessment Quarterly, 1–14.
Nadarajan, D. (2017): The Queens of the Night: A Focused Ethnography of the Literacy Practices and Refugee Identities of the Rohingya Women in Malaysia [Unpublished master’s thesis]. National Chung Cheng University.
Nadarajan, D. (2017): Portraits of Cinderellas: A Phenomenological Study of Identity and Second Language Use of Foreign Domestic Helpers in Malaysia. [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Nottingham.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
Nadarajan, D. (2022). Can the subaltern teacher speak? Voice and silence from the margins [Paper presentation]. Graduate Symposium Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Oxford.
Nadarajan, D. (2021) Desire, dreams, & destiny: Exploring how the subalterns ‘speak’ through pantoums and photos [Paper presentation]. Poetry and Research in Conversation Symposium, The Centre for Life-Writing Oxford.
Nadarajan, D. (2021). Agency in adversity: Teachers’ experiences of learning, pivoting, and innovating on the move during the pandemic [Paper presentation]. Yidan Prize Doctoral Conference, Department of Education, Oxford.
Nadarajan, D. (2019). Translingual tensions in in-service teacher education in Malaysia [Paper presentation]. English Teaching & Learning International Conference, Taiwan.
Nadarajan, D. (2018). Portraits of Cinderellas: A hermeneutic phenomenological exploration of identity and English language learning of foreign domestic workers in Malaysia [Paper presentation]. International Conference on TEFL and Applied Linguistics, Taiwan.
Nadarajan, D. (2017). Hide! There’s a zombie in school: Students’ perceptions of institutional rules in an urban Malaysian school [Paper presentation]. Sociology of Education Conference, Taiwan.
Nadarajan, D. (2016). What do parents seek? Factors influencing Malaysian parents’ decision to enrol their children in international schools in Malaysia [Paper presentation]. Hong Kong Comparative Education Conference, Hong Kong.
Nadarajan, D. (2015). From Michigan to Mekong: Lessons learnt from a technologically-impaired teacher [Paper presentation]. CamTESOL International Conference, Cambodia.