Adarsh Yadav

Biography

I completed my B.A. (Hons) English and M.A. English at the University of Delhi, India. During my undergraduate studies, I was a research student in an interdisciplinary project around the reinvention of folk theatre under professors from Political Science and English Literature. The project was funded by the Union Grant Commission of India. It focused focussed on theatre, neoliberal economy, and the attempts to revive local theatre by artists. The project left me with questions on collaborative research, academic knowledge production and feminist methodologies that I am hoping to explore in my PhD with engaged research.

I explored contemporary critical scholarship around disability studies and medical humanities during the Oceanvale Workshop organised by Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi. Following this, I pursued a certificate course in Disability Studies which brought together a transdisciplinary approach by including multiple frameworks including anthropology, sociology, public health, medicine, and literature together in a shared engagement. I have also researched on neo-colonial violence of medical institutions, hierarchical knowledge production, convalescence, caregiving, and travel in the works of Beryl Gilroy and John Irving. I have worked in the publishing industry, for a brief period and at times, I translate Hindi poetry.

I joined the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health in March 2022 as a PhD student.

Work I will be doing at the Centre

My proposed PhD project will look at the ways in which contemporary Indian English literature reflects, constructs and critiques neoliberal ideas of ‘care-giving’ in India, by close reading narratives of treatment and stigma as they emerge in relation to gender, caste and class in fiction. I will attempt to understand how fiction and lived experiences of ‘care’ and ‘burden’ operate through an interdisciplinary methodology that will involve engaged research. This project will interrogate not only how policies, privatisation and traditional family set-up affect patients and caregivers, but will also focus on the dialogue between the collaborator’s lived experiences and how they perceive literary representations.