Jo’s research in Thailand and the UK focuses on meditation practice and why it matters to people. 

Her work in Thailand examines meditation as a monastic practice, exploring the lives of Buddhist monks and nuns who practice and teach Burmese Vipassana. This work is an anthropological account of the motivation and experience of renouncers, the meaning of ascetic practices and monastic duties, and the effects that meditative practices have on individuals, gender hierarchy, and community organization in the monastery. 

Her research in the UK explores the introduction of meditation techniques into mental healthcare. Working with practitioners, therapists, politicians and advocates, Jo explores how meditation has been incorporated into understandings of the mind, flourishing and preventative healthcare. Taking political and public interest in mindfulness as its ethnographic focus, this work analyses practices of ethics, well-being and self-cultivation that crosscut emerging forms of governance in contemporary British society.  

Jo is the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and change in Thai monastic life (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of The State We’re In: Reflecting on democracy’s troubles (Berghan Books, 2016), Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) and Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power (Routledge, 2012).