Mental Health at the Margins

A co-created exhibition developed by IIHS and the sex worker community in Bangalore, through workshops, in-depth interviews, storytelling sessions and photo-voice, with the guidance and support from Sangama, an NGO working for the rights of sex workers and sexual minorities in Bangalore. 

It is virtually impossible to look at the issue of mental health without thinking about issues of identity and self among many related processes. In this backdrop this project attempts to build a narrative around mental wellbeing from the perspective of the hyper-marginalised worker cohort – sex workers in the city of Bangalore. Studies have identified that injuries to identity or self-worth are key architects of mental disorder, which is an everyday experience for this set of informal workers. Similarly, the stress that they go through in terms of minority stress – including stigma, isolation, prejudice, discrimination, hostile social environment and so on – are an important component in their definition of mental wellbeing, which is rarely captured or almost neglected in the meta-narratives and the policy discourse around mental wellbeing. 

This project – through multiple rounds of workshops, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews – co-creates and presents narratives around mental wellbeing from this vulnerable worker cohort in visually engaging ways to create a significant impact. In this pursuit there was little intention to intrude or collate extensive data about people’s lives, particularly for subjects that they felt reserved or awkward about. Rather, the intention was to provide a safe space where they could talk comfortably about any aspect of their emotional and physical journeys and experiences. Using research methods like participatory and community-based research ensured ethical documentation of their stories. In addition to this a detailed scrutiny of archival, legal and policy documents helped us further to create an ethnography useful to policy makers, mental health service providers, outreach workers and informants.

The exhibition will be at IIHS from 22 April, 2023 to 27 April, 2023.

Project Team:

Dr Neethi P is the principal investigator of this project. Neethi is a senior researcher at IIHS. Her research focuses on women informal workers and various forms and responses from upcoming alternative labour associations, exploring intersections of caste, class, gender, and urbanity, within informal work. Neethi’s research has covered sectors including garment, electronics, ports, home-based work, street vendors, sanitation workers, mill workers, and sex workers. She was a Fulbright DPR visiting scholar at the University of Georgia in the United States during her doctoral study. Neethi has authored Globalization Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Her recent co-authored work is Urban Undesirables: Street-based Sex work in Banaglore, under Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Sofia Juliet Rajan is an experienced journalist and editor who currently works with the Word Lab at IIHS. The Word Lab provides editorial support, writing assistance, and knowledge management services to various research programmes and projects at IIHS. 

Yashodara Udupa is a filmmaker and part of the IIHS Media Lab. She uses her media practice in research not only to create varied forms of outputs but also a method of inquiry. The IIHS Media Lab hopes to create a space where the use of images and sound can be a way of understanding the urban milieu and create new forms of knowledge production.