. · ✫ professional aims * . ·.
I am a developmental-cultural psychologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Developmental Risk and Cultural Resilience Laboratory (PI: Cindy H. Liu, PhD) at Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School. I earned my BA in from Northwestern University in 2016 and my MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018 and 2022, respectively.
Informed by work across the fields of Education, Sociology, Public Health, and Ethnic Studies, my research adopts a multidisciplinary, multi-method, and anti-oppressive approach to the study of youth mental health, coping, and socioemotional well-being across adolescence and the transition to adulthood. Relying on my expertise in peer relations research, history in student affairs and organizing, and lived experiences as a second-generation South Asian American, I am interested in examining and promoting relational and institutional contexts that support young people's positive development. As such, my research, teaching, and mentorship are infused with an ethic of justice and care for youth across the various stages, spaces, and places of their development. I am deeply committed to working /with/ young people, in support of their resilience, resistance, and mere existence.
zzz
✧˚ my journey ✺ ~ ·
Born in the Northeast US and raised in the Midwest, I am the eldest daughter of first-generation immigrants who moved from India to the U.S. in the post-1965 era.
As a class- and caste-privileged South Asian American, I attended school in the western suburbs of Chicago. These privileges and opportunities have facilitated my ability to pursue my undergraduate and graduate education, and now my post-doctoral training at highly-rejective (or highly-selective) institutions.
At the same time, my hometown growing up was particularly non-diverse and I both witnessed in others, and experienced first-hand, the isolation, alienation, and targeted harassment of students who didn't fit into the societal racial, religious, middle-class, non-disabled norm. This environment posed a lot of challenges to my identity development, self-understanding, and grasp of my place in society.
Being a child of immigrants, I often felt like an "inbetweener," occupying the metaphorical cultural borderlands between South Asia and the United States (Anzaldúa, 1987). I never particularly achieved a feeling of belonging in grade school, nor did I ever feel truly "American" — peers were sure to let me know that I was too brown-skinned and too immigrant to deserve the identity. The racial justice uprisings around the murders of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and 18-year-old Michael Brown constituted my political awakening and put into the perspective the experiences and miseducation I'd received across my own developmental journey, in a graduating high school class that was only 10% students of Color and subsequently as an undergraduate student at a predominately White institution (i.e., "PWI").
The discussions around structural oppression and racial violence resonated deeply with my own past and gave me the language to critically inspect the negative experiences I had growing up and in the aftermath of 9/11/2001, which saw stark increases in Islamophobic and anti-immigrant violence. In 2012, I began to more concentratedly educate myself on structural oppression in all its permutations: racism and anti-Blackness, ableism, classism, adultism, and caste oppression, to name only a few. Since then, I have come to understand how my freedom is inextricably linked with freedom for all oppressed peoples. This understanding serves as the foundation along my journey as a scientist, educator, mentor, and community organizer. I reflect almost daily on how far I have come and to explore and imagine what comes next. My aim is to leverage my research, teaching, and unique social positioning toward liberation in partnership with oppressed peoples in the U.S. and transnationally. In the words of Indigenous poet Tanaya Winder, this is my heartwork.
Student-led action of 8 minutes of silence following the 2014 police murder of Eric Garner. (Barcelona, Spain)
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Aboriginal activists group;
Queensland, Australia; 1970s
✵ ✷ * * · · + * ˚ ⊹ . · ˚ * ˚ . ✺ ·