Playing music with the manual scavenging community converted to
Dalit Avataris - singing songs of liberation from oppression

Dr. Sushrut Jadhav* is Senior Lecturer in Cross-cultural Psychiatry, UCL; Consultant Psychiatrist at Focus Camden Homeless Outreach Services, Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK; Co-director of UCL Cultural Consultation Service for Staff & Students, and Founding Editor, Anthropology and Medicine journal (Taylor & Francis, UK).

His current teaching and research interests focus on mental health at the margins across cultures, with a focus on India. Dr. Jadhav pioneered the Bloomsbury Cultural Formulation Interview, a clinical ethnographic technique to better engage with people suffering from mental illness across cultures. He is also Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, SOAS, London, UK

*Disclaimer: Dr Jadhav is teaching in a private capacity for this course and not representing UCL

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Dr. Shubha Ranganathan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her work is broadly located at the interface of culture, gender and psychology, particularly with reference to issues of women’s health and illness. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of medical anthropology, gender studies, and alternate paradigms within psychology such as critical psychology. She has been engaged in explorations of local practices of healing among marginalized groups, carrying out ethnographic studies of phenomena such as spirit possession, trance, and indigenous healing. In the area of mental health and psychosocial disabilities, her research is framed by critical perspectives, focuses on lived experiences and narratives of people presumed to be ‘abnormal’ or ‘different’.