Manu Multani is a PhD candidate in anthropology and social change at the California Institute of Integral Studies in California. The institute has set its professional goals with the intention to not only emphasize the struggles of South Asian (SA) communities but also to seek, recognize, and name the solutions through which SA communities can resist. Manu has co-founded a podcast, ReThink Desi, to showcase such narratives. She is also an emerging filmmaker who focuses on visual aesthetics and storytelling for social change.
Manu has worked as a health program planner for several years for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco, engaging in local community discussions regarding public services such as hospital-based care, food insecurity, and homelessness; this has resulted in her acquiring expertise in understanding the lived realities of social determinants of health and disparities. Manu is also a two-time recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship for Panjabi in addition to the Hollywood Foreign Press Scholarship, Student Scholarship at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Education, and the Public Health Hero Award. She also has a master’s in global health and a bachelor’s in philosophy.
Manu currently lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and pup. During their free time, they like to read culturally diverse cookbooks to integrate new spices and techniques into their own cooking.
For her Fulbright-Nehru multimodal ethnographic study, Manu is investigating how young North Indian adults define and experience romantic, healthy relationships and how these reciprocally inform their sexual scripts. Through qualitative in-depth interviews and a participatory action research methodology – whereby the participants document short videos – she is attempting to produce a visual ethnography truer to the real experiences of the participants. Overall, this project unravels how sexual health and sexuality education become a part of what is known as “sexual literacy”, thereby contributing to the dearth of scholarship on North Indian youth sexualities.