Akriti is a PhD candidate in Social Research Methods supervised by Dr Flora Cornish and Dr Sara Salem.
Akriti also works as a Researcher on the user-led EURIKHA project based at the Service User Research Enterprise (King’s College London) where she leads the Global South part of the project. As part of her role, she examines knowledge production by persons with psychosocial disabilities, mental health service users, and survivors of psychiatry.
She began her journey towards survivor research with an academic background in psychology followed by an MSc in Global Mental Health. Her own experiences of mental distress and mental health services as well as the work of other users, survivors, and persons with psychosocial disabilities led her to critically re-examine what ‘madness’ meant. It is this knowledge and experiences that drive her work.
Akriti’s doctoral thesis explores the construction of ‘psychosocial disability’ as an identity and framework and its use in activism and advocacy in India. It seeks to understand the configurations of social movement(s) led by persons with psychosocial disability and the points of collaborations and contestations between the psychosocial disability movement(s) and the mainstream disability movement(s). Fundamental to this research enquiry, and her broader interests, are questions of injustice, of power imbalances, of oppression and exclusion, but also equally of resistance and solidarities, of inclusive movement-building, and of creating communities and practices of care.