'Everyday life is a big deal': UTM researcher's work offers insight into Indian, Pakistani immigrant experience
Hema Ganapathy-Coleman’s latest research begins with a central question: How is daily life lived when separated from the country and culture of one's origins?
In examining quiet acts of everyday living, the assistant psychology professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga looks for revelations about identity, belonging, and resilience.
Whether it’s an immigrant Indian parent driving an hour each way for a child's dance class, the lighting of a prayer lamp at dusk, or gathering at a mosque on Fridays, everyday choices reveal something deeper about how immigrant families transmit values, culture, and identity across generations, she says.
“I’ve always been interested not just in what parents do, but why they do it,” she says.
“Everyday life gives a good window into what they’re thinking, what motivates them. I find that we feel everyday life is very mundane … But daily life is deeply political in many ways.”
Individuals are affected by elements like socio-economic class, caste, gender, and race, says Ganapathy-Coleman, as well as expectations of ethno-cultural communities.
“Everyday life is a big deal.”
Ganapathy-Coleman’s latest project offers a closer look at everyday moments from the lives of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in Peel Region, which is home to UTM. Photographs from that project – and accompanying narratives – are set to go on display at UTM this month in a new exhibit, before being showcased in the wider community.
“It is my invitation to people to see Indian and Pakistani immigrants differently. They're often lumped together under the category of South Asian and stereotyped as culturally homogenous, maybe a little unwanted,” says Ganapathy-Coleman.
“Through this exhibition, I want to show that they’re working, playing, praying, gardening, studying. They live varied, intentional, and meaningful lives. And we don’t usually get to see that.”
Photographs from the project, known as PhotoVoice, showcase families gathered around meals, children at prayer, snow-covered cars, citizenship ceremonies and quiet moments of reflection. The exhibition, titled “In the Quiet of Everyday Life,” will be on display at UTM from Oct. 9 to Oct. 17.
Ganapathy-Coleman, a developmental psychologist who also directs the Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities, has focused her research for 25 years on the lived experiences of Indian immigrants in North America.
Her early work took her from Baltimore's large Indian diaspora to Indiana, where a small but close-knit community of Indian and Pakistani professionals had settled. Twelve years ago, she moved to Canada and joined UTM, a shift that brought her to Peel Region, home to one of the largest South Asian communities in North America.
Ganapathy-Coleman began teaching courses in diaspora and transnational studies, later transitioning into cross-cultural psychology. Students would show up to her office hours, not just to discuss course material, but to share personal stories. They spoke about therapists who misunderstood their cultural backgrounds, about feeling invisible in psychological research, and about the challenges and rewards of growing up in Canada with immigrant parents or grandparents.
Ganapathy-Coleman invited them in as collaborators — deepening a participatory approach she had refined over decades.
Through the Research Opportunity Program, undergraduate students joined her as research assistants. Many had ties to the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in the Greater Toronto Area. They helped shape her latest study, recruited participants, and brought their own lived experiences to the table.
Before going further, however, Ganapathy-Coleman wanted to know what the participants themselves thought she should be studying – that’s how the PhotoVoice project began.
Instead of researchers extracting data from passive subjects, PhotoVoice placed cameras and narrative control in participants' hands.
The move reflects Ganapathy-Coleman's commitment to community-engaged scholarship and challenges psychology's tendency to study marginalized communities without including them in knowledge production.
“We asked them to capture the people, places, events, objects, experiences, and hardships that characterize their everyday lives,” says Ganapathy-Coleman.
Fifteen participants submitted nearly 300 photographs, each one captioned and discussed in group sessions held on campus. For many, it was the first time they had been invited into an academic space not as subjects, but as collaborators.
“Based on what they told us and showed us was important, I designed a series of interview schedules that we are now using to collect data from more members of the community,” says Ganapathy-Coleman.
She is currently working with a second group of students on this larger study. They plan to interview 120 participants over five years. Each participant begins by keeping a detailed seven-day diary of their routines, with the entries then shaping a series of personalized interviews.
Ganapathy-Coleman’s approach is slow, intentional, and deeply collaborative. It is also reshaping how South Asian immigrant communities are represented in research.
"The main objective is to get a holistic, fine-grained understanding of the Indian and Pakistani community here in the Peel Region through a psychological lens," says Ganapathy-Coleman.
"But psychology's frameworks weren't developed with immigrant experiences in mind, so the experiences participants describe often fall outside psychology's traditional concerns.”
Ganapathy-Coleman is using an interdisciplinary approach as her work develops, reflecting her conviction that immigrant experience exceeds what a single discipline can capture.
"My teaching, research, and own experience as an Indian immigrant have aligned in profound ways," Ganapathy-Coleman says.
"What the generosity and openness of the community has shown me is that representation matters — not just being included in research, but having control over how their lives are interpreted and shared."
