PhD Thesis
PhD Thesis Title: From Troubled Pasts to Occluded Futures: A Clinic-Based Ethnography of Female Sterilisation 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 population policy, family planning, contraception, and gender relations. Her doctoral project investigates 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 PhD thesis 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 ‘voluntary’ while also departing from the dominant formulation of the ‘dark past’ of sterilisation and population control. Instead, it demonstrates the multiply situated logics of contemporary sterilisation-use in India that are bound in the everyday and ordinary language, relationships, negotiations, imaginaries, and futurities of reproduction.
Areas of expertise
- Reproductive Politics
- Family Planning and Contraception
- Population and Fertility
Selected publications and Works
- 2026. Love, Suspicion, Shame: Stratified Vasectomies in Northwest India.” Gender Campus Blog Symposium on Men, Masculinities, and Reproduction.
- 2025. Book Review: Eva Fiks, State Intimacies: Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 43(2).
- 2023. A review of “Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis” by Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Duke University Press 2021). Doing Sociology.
- 2021. “Gender and Family Planning: A Close Reading of Forty Years of India's Family Planning Policies (1977-2019)”. Social and Political Research Foundation.
- 2021. A review of “Mother: An Unconventional History” by Sarah Knott (Penguin UK 2019). Doing Sociology.
Academic work experience
- Visiting PhD Researcher, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh (2025)
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, Anthropology & Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, Interdisciplinary Masters, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Editorial Board Member, New Sociological Perspectives, London School of Economics and Political Science
- Research Assistant, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London (2020)
fellowships, grants and awards
- Doc-Mobility Grant (2025)
- Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2022-2025)