Zehra Mehdi Awarded International Psychoanalytical Association Research Grant

Congratulations to sixth year PhD student Zehra Mehdi for being awarded the 2021-2022 International Psychoanalytical Association research grant for her project, The 'Work of Religion': Trauma, Mourning, and Political Resistance. Her dissertation is a psychoanalytic exploration of the ways in which Muslims, as persecuted religious minorities in India, articulate their oppression at the hands of the Hindu nationalist regime. Conducting extensive ethnographic fieldwork (2019-2021) in North India (old lucknow, Uttar Pradesh) with Muslims during nation-wide protests against the citizenship amendment act (CAA), her dissertation  explores the ways in which Muslims actively use religion to pursue the psychic work of making sense of their traumatic experiences, and mourning their losses; this further allows them to reject the projective identifications of the persecutory nation-state, and thereby refuse their ‘political othering’ by demanding the recognition of their reality as equals.