Maha is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, working at the intersections of migration, gender, religion and material culture in South Asia. Trained in sociology, media studies, and anthropology, her scholarship examines how people negotiate belonging as a set of everyday lived experiences through material, sensory, and affective charters, with particular attention to women’s experiences of migration and domestic work.

Mahashewta has taught as a Sessional Instructor in the Department of Anthropology at UBC, designing and delivering undergraduate courses in the Anthropology of Food and the Ethnography of South Asia. She has also held teaching and academic support roles across anthropology and interdisciplinary programmes, including as a Senior Teaching Assistant and Writing Consultant at UBC’s Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communications. Her pedagogical interests centre on critical, inclusive and experiential approaches to teaching, particularly those that bring ethnographic thinking into conversation with students’ everyday worlds.

Her scholarship has been presented at international conferences, including meetings of the American Ethnological Society (AES), the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).

Her writing has appeared in Economic & Political Weekly, edited scholarly collections, and public-facing publications. Her research and academic work have received support from the UBC Public Scholars Initiative, the Institute of Asian Research, the Centre for Migration Studies, and the Public Humanities Hub, where she is a 2026 Graduate Research Fellow.

Her doctoral dissertation draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India to investigate how Bengali-speaking migrant women remake home across rural and urban spaces. Attending to domestic objects, religious practices, food, memory and embodied routines, her research approaches home-making as a form of creative, gendered labour, through which women negotiate displacement, social hierarchies and the demands of urban wage work.

Her broader research interests encompass the anthropology of care, everyday religion, sensory ethnography, visual and material cultures, and the politics of mobility and belonging. Her earlier research on visual impairment and critical ethnographic methodologies interrogates the politics of perception, representation and knowledge production, with particular attention to how embodied and sensory experiences challenge the visual and ableist assumptions embedded in conventional ethnographic practice.

The Flag, A Rap and The Ethnographer. In Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions (pp. 40-51), Dec, 2022.

Muttering Women and the Talking Kitchens of Bengal, EPW, Vol. 56, Issue No. 33, 14 Aug, 2021

Rethinking Possessions. Partition Museum Vlog, Jan, 2021

Book Review: Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo, p 173-76, IJET Journal, July 2020, ISSN 2581-8325, Vol. 2, No.2, July 2020

Walls That Speak : Visual Background as a Window to the Social Background, EPW, Vol. 55, Issue No. 20, 16 May, 2020

A Bibliography Apart, LiveWire, 6 Oct, 2020

Hisaab: The Price We Pay For Menstrual Bleeding Every Month, Feminism In India, 2 Jun, 2020

For Assar, My Friend From Kashmir, LiveWire, 22 Feb, 2020

President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award, 2021-24

Four Year Fellowship (FYF) for PhD students, Aug, 2021

International Tuition Award, Aug 2021

Four Year Fellowships (4YF) Tuition Awards, Aug, 2021

UBC Institute of Asian Research Fellowship, 2022-23

UBC Institute of Asian Research Travel Grant, Mar, 2023

UBC Public Scholars Initiative Award, July, 2023

CASCA Travel Grant, May 2025

UBC G+PS Graduate Travel Grant, June 2025

UBC Centre for Migration Studies Research Grant, 2025

UBC Public Humanities Hub Fellowship Grant, 2026

Dr. Alexia Bloch