PhD Thesis
Title: Apprehending Asylum: Credibility, Innocence, and LGBT Refugees in Switzerland
PhD Supervisor: Aditya Bharadwaj & Miriam Ticktin
Expected completion Date: 2026
Aadarsh’s research examines how LGBT asylum seekers in Switzerland learn to make their lives credible. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with asylum seekers and rights advocates who support them, the project explores asylum not as an institution alone but as a wider social field of anticipation, advice, rehearsal, and suspicion. Using queer phenomenology, it reveals asylum as a regime that demands mediated truth, disavows the mediation it requires, and turns that disavowal into a border technology operating through credibility assessment, asylum reception centres, and peer relations of support themselves. Refusing to answer suspicion by restoring claimants to innocence, Aadarsh’s work develops an anti-innocence critique and asks why credibility and innocence should authorise movement and life.
Areas of expertise
- LGBT asylum
- Innocence
- Abolition
- Queer migration
- Humanitarian borders
- Queer theory
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Gender and sexuality
- Asylum systems
- Credibility assessment
- Evidence and truth-making
Fellowships, Grants, and Awards
- Swiss National Science Foundation Doc.CH grant (2022-25)
- Fondation Hans Wilsdorf scholarship (2019-21)
Publications and Works
- Gangwar, Aadarsh. “On My Unexpected Foray into Textual Analysis (And the Value of Methodological Flexibility)”, in Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, 7 Jun. 2023, available at: https://frontiers.csls.ox.ac.uk/foray-into-textual-analysis
- Gangwar, Aadarsh. “Review of ‘Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela’”, in Allegra Lab, 27 Jan. 2023, available at: https://allegralaboratory.net/minoritarian-liberalism-a-travesti-life-in-a-brazilian-favela/