Prof Aparna Vyas is a social Psychologist working in the area of caste and gender issues, creativity and imagination, visual arts and literature. Drawing upon the theoretical affordances provided by cultural psychology, she has worked on Dalit resistance specifically focusing on the literature of resistance. She is trained in Vygotskian tradition of research, critical social psychology and qualitative research methods. Her methodological interests include content analysis, narrative analysis and discourse analysis, critical and Foucauldian. Based on her fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh, she has explored the embodied emotional experience of Peeda by analyzing the narratives of women from various social locations and has found that how the experience and expression of Peeda can be stigmatized. She has presented her work at many national and international conferences including International Congress of Psychology, Yokohama, Japan and fifth international conference on an unfinished legacy of Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar organized by ICI, The New School, New York, U.S.A.

Her doctoral research from Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University focuses on the critique of 'great man approach' inherent in psycho-biographical tradition and explores the co-creation of political art emanating from students' movements with a specific focus on Jawaharlal Nehru University. In the course of this research, she has also theoretically mapped the evolution of psychohistory through a critical inquiry into various turns and transitions.

She is a gold medalist in M.A. (Psychology) from M.J.P Rohilkhand University and also a recipient of Krishna Bihari Vajpayee award by Hindi Sahitya Samsthan, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Before joining JGU, she has also worked as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at School of Humanities and Social Sciences, G. D. Goenka University, Haryana.

Publications

• Vyas, A. (2020). A Cultural Psychological Reading of Dalit Literature: A Case Study of ’Joothan’ By Om Prakash Valmiki. CASTE / A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, 1(2), 157-168.  https://doi.org/10.26812/caste.v1i2.188

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• Vyas, A. & Panda, M. (2019). Reification of Collective Victimhood: Dalit Narratives, Social Repositioning and Transformation. Psychology and Developing Societies, 31(1), 106-138. Sage. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0971333618825056

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