PhD Thesis

PhD Thesis Title: Revisiting the Sterilisation Debate: Female Sterilisation as the Ordinary in Northwest India

PhD Supervisor: Aditya Bharadwaj and Shaila Seshia Galvin (2nd Reader)

Expected completion date: 2026

Arushi’s research focuses on socio-political and cultural dimensions of reproduction, specifically interested in its relation to policy, health, rights, and gender relations. Her doctoral project investigates contemporary reproductive and population politics, examining how female surgical sterilisation comes to be enabled, elected and enacted as the most prevalent mode of contraception in India.

Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a family planning clinic in urban northwest India, her research looks at the everyday uptake of female sterilisation at the intersection of state population control projects, non-governmental and rights-based organisations, clinical encounters and biomedical formulations of contraception and fertility, gendered relations of reproductive labour, and contested postoperative imaginaries and reproductive futures. Overall, the thesis eschews dominant binaries of sterilisation as either “forced” or as “voluntary,” and instead demonstrates the multiply situated logics of sterilisation-use in India that gestate this contraceptive technology as an ordinary event against an extraordinary biopolitics of population control and reproductive governance.
 

Areas of expertise
 

• Reproductive Politics
• Family Planning and Contraception
• Population and Fertility

Selected publications and Works
 

fellowships, grants and awards
 

• Doc-Mobility Grant (2025)
• Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2022-2025)