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
Profile
My research centres around socio-political and cultural dimensions of reproduction, specifically interested in its relation to policy, health, rights and gender relations.
I received my undergraduate degree in sociology from University of Delhi, and then attended the London School of Economics for a postgraduate in the same. During the latter, I worked on India’s family planning and contraceptive infrastructures as shaped by processes of reproductive governance, gender norms, population policy, and public health formulations on sexual and reproductive health.
My doctoral project further develops this tone of research on contemporary reproductive, contraceptive and population politics, with a particular focus on how female surgical sterilisation comes to be enabled, elected and enacted as the most prevalent mode of contraception in India.
Academic Work experience
- Editorial Board Member, New Sociological Perspectives
Relevant Publications and Works
- 2023. “Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis by Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2021): A Review by Arushi Sahay”. 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. “Mother: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott: A Review by Arushi Sahay (2019)”. Doing Sociology.
fellowships, grants and awards
- Doc-Mobility Grant (2025)
- Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2022-2025)