Along with Alberto Vasquez, I am the co-director of Mad Thinking.
Mad Thinking is an initiative dedicated to creating spaces, tools, and opportunities to explore key questions about power, leadership, organisational strength, and solidarity, with the aim of building stronger, sustainable, and inclusive disability movements. We strive to move beyond single-issue organising, connecting disability activism with other social justice movements, including feminism, queer organising, climate justice, and anti-authoritarian efforts.
Mad Thinking is especially committed to amplifying marginalised voices within the disability community, particularly those from the global South, those experiencing multiple layers of marginalisation, and emerging activists and advocates.
For more, visit the Mad Thinking website here.
My thesis explores the emerging concepts, frameworks, and identity locations within mental health and disability activism in India by people with lived experience of mental (ill)health and psychosocial disability. I am particularly interested in the intersection of disability and mental health and the emergence of concepts such as ‘psychosocial disability’. My research explores how mental health and disability concepts emerge through activism; how they are mobilized by activists with psychosocial disabilities; and how psychosocial disability activism is influenced by and in turn influences broader cross-disability activism.
This research project centers the global South, especially India, and the knowledges and experiences of activists with psychosocial disabilities. It rejects a purely biomedical understanding of mental health, rather it aligns itself with the approaches advanced by disability activists and scholars. The research views experiences of disability as multi-faceted and will privilege the work and voices of those who experience multiple marginalisations in India.