PhD Supervisor: Aditya Bharadwaj & Miriam Ticktin
Expected completion Date: 2026
Aadarsh’s doctoral project focuses on credibility assessment practices within Swiss asylum procedures involving queer claimants, an increasingly prevalent yet understudied phenomenon. The “culture of disbelief” within bureaucratic asylum procedures places a disproportionate burden of proof on such claimants, requiring them to convince authorities not only of the persecution they have faced but also of their sexual or gender identity itself, a deeply intimate and often slippery facet of the self. Through an ethnographic exposition of how queer asylum seekers wrestle with this unique predicament both within asylum systems and without (in associative spaces), this project will illuminate how they produce the truth of their identities, the truth-telling conventions they mobilise to do so, and the alternatives they imagine and practice to notions of truth circulating within asylum systems.
Sexuality
gender
Migration
Asylum
Credibility
Truth