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Brinda Jegatheesan Assistant Professor, Educational Psychology and Early Childhood and Family Studies 322J Miller Hall - Phone 221-5360 brinda@u.washington.edu

Education Publications Research Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Jegatheesan’s work addresses the problem of socialization of bilingual and multilingual children with autism and other developmental disabilities. Her recent work has focused on three South Asian Islamic immigrant children with autism and their socialization through multiple languages to become competent members in different cultural settings. Virtually nothing is known about how multilingual immigrant communities understand autism or how they take care of their children.  She has found that parents have a particular religious and cultural lens through which they interpret the challenge of raising a child with autism, and this lens is dramatically different from the lens used by most majority culture scholars and professionals. Dr. Jegatheesan’s work also focuses on bilingual special education, ethnomedical beliefs/practices and their implications for allied health and early intervention services. She is currently examining the medical narratives of Asian immigrant families in their diagnosis and treatment of their children with autism.

Dr. Jegatheesan is committed to comparative research and is currently working with schools in Singapore and India. She uses ethnographic and case study approaches and focuses on the micro-level analysis of discourse. She is proficient in six languages and has worked as a regular and special education teacher and service provider in India, Singapore and Hawaii. She is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities (IASSID), American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the International Society for Anthrozoology (ISAZ). She received her doctorate in Early Childhood Special Education with a concentration in Cultural Studies and Interpretive Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She was a fellow at the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2004-2005. Dr. Jegatheesan was born in Singapore and raised and schooled in Singapore and India.

Education

Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005

Selected Publications

Jegatheesan, Brinda (Invited, in press). Autism: A cultural understanding of autism in South Asian Muslim families. In Shweder, R.A., Bidell, T., Dailey, A., Dixon, S., Miller, P.J., & Modell, J. The Chicago Companion to the Child.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Stake, R., & Jegatheesan, B (in press). Access, A Zone of Comprehension, and Intrusion. In Advances in Program Evaluation Series, Elsevier Science: UK

Jegatheesan, B., & Meadan, H (2006). Pets in the Classroom: Promoting and Enhancing the Socio-Emotional Wellness of Young Children. Young Exceptional Children Monograph, 8, 1-12.

Jegatheesan, Brinda (2005). I see the stars: An autoethnographer speaks on fieldwork and flashbacks. Qualitative Inquiry, 11 (5), 667-688

Jegatheesan, B., Miller, P., & Fowler, S (under review). Autism from a religious perspective: A study of parental beliefs in South Asian Muslim immigrant families.  Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities.

Jegatheesan, B., Fowler, S., & Miller, P (under review). From symptom recognition to services: How South Asian Muslim immigrant families navigate autism. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities.

West., E, & Jegatheesan, B (under review). Rethinking functional skills for minority children with severe disabilities, Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities

Jegatheesan, B., & Meadan, H (under review). Pets and Young Children: Supporting Early Development. Young Children

Research Projects

Diagnosis and Post-Diagnosis Period: Needs and Supports Reported by Asian Immigrant Families of Young Children with Developmental Disabilities (2006)
Dr. Jegatheesan (P.I) is currently engaged in field work with 21 Asian (Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Korean, Japanese & Indian) immigrant families who have children with neurological and developmental disabilities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Her research is a multilingual ethnographic study of the diagnostic and post-diagnostic period of a young child's diagnosis with a developmental disability.  This study is funded by the ARC of Washington, USA.

Beliefs and Experiences of Disability in Asian and European American Children who have Siblings with Autism: Pictorial and Narrative Representation (2007)
Dr. Jegatheesan (P.I). Cross-cultural comparative fieldwork is currently being conducted between Asian immigrant and European American children who have siblings with autism in the Pacific North West.  The study is examining sibling-sibling with autism relationship and communicative interaction style using art and narrative as modes of expression.

The Impact of Culture on the Human-Animal Bond: A Cross Cultural Study with Young Children (2007)
Dr. Jegatheesan (P.I) will examine the socio-cultural and psychological complexity in children’s relationship and bond, both positive (e.g., emotional support, development of empathy & compassion) and negative (e.g., teasing, bullying and abuse) with their pets and explore their developmental significance.  Sixty children from three immigrant groups living in the United States will participate in this study. This research study is funded by the Waltham and AAH/ABV Center, United Kingdom.

Ways of Being at Home and Community: Language Socialization of Children with Autism in Multilingual South Asian Immigrant Families (2005)
Dr. Jegatheesan (P.I) - Longitudinal ethnographic study, combining participant-observation with audio and video recordings in naturalistic environments to examine the influence of broad socio-cultural factors on care-giver child interactions and language development in young children with autism in three multilingual South Asian immigrant families. The study documents the rich and complex communicative environment in which these children lived. It also documents parents’ beliefs and expectations on how to communicate with their child. Funded/supported by the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and theLanguage Learning Center, University of Michigan.