Researcher

In 2017, my research spans three areas, which are as follows. The order of listing is not an order of priority, as all three are aspects of my daily and weekly schedules.

Music

In Music– I am keenly interested in music pedagogy, with particular emphasis on distinction between teaching school going children from teaching adults on one hand and within that, how to teach younger children as opposed to older children. Concomitantly, my research follows three  distinct strands within music pedagogy. In two of these

I am directly involved in research- and testing with children- via working on newer musical compositions, teaching that to the children and seeing their interest in particular compositions or Ragas.

In Teacher Training, music can be incorporated in a meaningful manner to make teaching and learning different and music based within the classroom. For that effort I am repeatedly trying to work with trainee teachers in colleges and universities. There are many challenges at present within the Indian education system which trains teachers, in particular a scarcity of resources. Dealing with that scarcity is a big issue for teaching music and without dealing with it squarely one cannot really do any meaningful work. At the time of writing this, I have had two significant experiences (of 18 hours each) which lead me to writing something meaningful in research about how and why music could be a part of teacher training and what can be taught within the resource constraints etc.

Counseling

My counseling practice is an outcome of different strands drawn from different disciplines, principally social constructionist dialogic practice, discourse analysis, critical perspectives and emancipatory, participatory methods. This is an ever unfolding work, but for now undocumented as there is so much to write in other domains. I intend to start training others in my methods, especially in Recovery Oriented Counseling that I offer from a peer perspective. This is one of the key things in the pipeline now, on the training front. Research is always on, as usual.

Recovery in Mental ‘Illness’/Psychosis

Psychosis is one of the most intractable of mental ‘illness’ diagnosis a person can receive. It has a damning outcome on whoever does. Do people ever ‘recover’ from such a thing or do they live their lives in the belief that they are mentally ‘ill’ and therefore helpless?

This is one of the issues of my PhD research, which I am approaching as someone with a lived experience of the same phenomenon that I am studying. My doctoral research is in the area of mental health laws in India, as I am enrolled in a Law University! As part of my work I am doing a mixed methods study which has both empirical and doc-

trinal components. I will also be looking into how the Indian Mental Health Act is complying with her commitment to the UNCRPD.

All my research can be downloaded from my academia or ResearchGate Links.

Whenever I can manage it, I try to write some of my observations or readings or any other thoughts on a blog I maintain about my research.