National Conference of Psychology: Bridging Theory and Practice

KP/ Ketki Ranade (pronouns: they/ them) is faculty at the Center for Health and Mental Health, School of Social Work, TISS, Mumbai. KP's research, writing and teaching is in the areas of mental health law, policy, programmes and advocacy, LGBTQ mental health, clinical social work and research methodology.

KP is the author of 'Growing Up Gay - A critical psychosocial perspective', Springer (2018) and lead author of 'Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice - A Resource Book for Mental Health Practitioners in India', MHI (2022) as well as Trans Affirmative Mental Health Care Guidelines: results of a mixed-method inquiry in three cities of India (2023). They have edited a Special Issue of the Indian Journal of Social Work titled, Coming Out Of The Dark: Emerging Discourse On Queer Affirmative Mental Health Practice In India in 2022.

KP has served on committees of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India, to develop status and planning documents for trans inclusion. They continue to advocate for queer and trans inclusion in institutions of higher education and mental health service spaces and curriculum.

Tanmoy is a user-survivor and creator of the independent mental health storytelling platform Sanity. He is a fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism,

University of Oxford; an advisor to the Centre for Global Mental Health; and a jury member for the Project SIREN Awards for responsible reporting on suicide. He has led the edit desks at Fortune India and The Economic Times Prime, and has been published in The Lancet Psychiatry, Business Insider, and The Mekong Review. As an expert on the intersection of lived experience and the media, Tanmoy has delivered lectures and workshops at Columbia University, the University of Amsterdam, and Sangath, among others, and contributed to WHO South-East Asia’s Kathmandu Charter for the rights of persons with lived experience. He is a winner of IE Business School, Madrid’s Asian Economic Journalism Prize and a LinkedIn Top Voice in Social Impact.

Divya Kandukuri is an Ambedkarite feminist activist, trainer, writer and media practitioner. She is the founder of The Blue Dawn, a mental health collective that upholds anti-caste and feminist politics in its functioning. The Blue Dawn has been working on bringing discussions on caste and mental health to the forefront of India’s mental health discourse through its social justice lens towards mental health. Divya has also been a trainer for The Blue Dawn and works with social workers, media professionals, and mental health professionals to equip them with tools to incorporate discussions on the caste system, feminism and social justice into their practices. In addition to her work with The Blue Dawn, she is an independent media practitioner and video producer. Drawing from her lived experiences as an inter-caste, inter-faith individual, she focuses on inter-relations of caste, gender, pop culture, and mental health. Currently, Divya also works as a Senior Projects Associate at Zubaan, a feminist publication house and an active archiver of feminist and women’s movements in South Asia. Her role involves working with Zubaan Projects, which works with a particular focus on historically marginalised and oppressed groups. Divya has gotten her International Diploma in Narrative Practices in 2021. She had published a chapter in Prof Radhika Gajjala’s book titled Digital Diasporas: Labour and Affect in Gendered Indian Digital Publics and a short illustrated story titled ‘Selavu’ published in The Bystander Anthology by Kadak Collective. When not doing boring work on her laptop, she is a full time dog mom and an avid horror movie-watcher and wishes to see the world free of prejudice.

Shubha Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her background is eclectic and interdisciplinary, having been trained in psychology but drawing on ethnographic approaches to questions around health, gender, and disability. Her research draws on a range of disciplines such as anthropology, gender studies, disability studies, and alternate paradigms within psychology such as critical and qualitative psychology. She has been engaged in qualitative explorations of local practices of healing among marginalized groups, as well as health and disability-related projects in India. Her work is framed by critical and social justice perspectives, focusing on lived experiences and the role of advocacy for social change. Currently, she is exploring questions about parenting and care in the context of autism as part of her engagement with the neurodiversity discourse in India.

She can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dr Hamid Dabholkar is a Psychaitrist. He works as director of Parivartan trust a community development organization working in the field of mental health for last three decades. He has experience of designing and implementation of large scale community based mental health programs in different states of India. His work through Parivartan has focused on making high quality and culturally appropriate holistic mental health services available at door steps for the communities in need. Development of training courses for different mental health cadres and augmentation of mental health service deliver through use of technology are his areas of interest

Prof and Head, UG and PG Department of Psychology. Modern College, Ganeshkhind, Autonomous, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India. My work has focused on interrogating the canons of mainstream psychology theories, practice, and applications from a critical, feminist, and global south perspective. As an educator and a researcher too, I have tried to subvert, refashion, and analyse curricula of psychology in my university in India from an intersectional feminist perspective. My therapeutic practice is a feminist psychotherapeutic one which talks to the sociocultural diversity and marginalized persons and questions the status quo and top-down mainstream mental health practice. I facilitate a speak out and peer support group in my higher education campus where young adults from a cross section of society are helped by student coordinators who drive this group. Most of my research has been around low-income group communities and psychosocial health. My recent work is around marginalized communities in India, higher education, and social justice issues and persistent inequalities.

Honey Oberoi Vahali is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India. She has a particular interest in understanding the historical roots of emotional suffering and forging bridges between psychoanalysis, visions of social justice and spiritual worldviews, especially Buddhism and related streams of compassion and non-violence. Her work in psychoanalysis foregrounds the culture-psyche axis with special efforts to empathetically engage with the psychological struggles of human lives at socio-political margins. It has been her endeavour to conceptualize a model of psychoanalytical psychotherapy in the Indian context that is deep going and yet freely accessible to those in need. She has been advocating for a rethinking of the ethics of mental health, especially psychoanalytical practice. She has been working to evolve innovative training possibilities of psychodynamic psychotherapist in Indian context. She considers psychotherapy as a deep commune between two persons. At another level, she also believes that psychoanalysis has a radical and subversive potential for political thinking and social transformation. She has been the founding Director of the Centre of Psychotherapy and Clinical Research, AUD, a centre in a university context dedicated to a vision of psychoanalytical work along the lines of social and emotional justice. A large part of her effort has been to bridge critical and humane visions of higher education. As a teacher, she believes that teaching is an intense dialogical and relational encounter, a process that can potentially transform the being of the teacher as well as of her students. Reflecting on the above is her edited volume, “A Song Called Teaching: Ebbs and Flows of Experiential and Empathetic Pedagogies”, Aakar Books, 2019. She has also written extensively on psychoanalysis, psychotherapy as well as mental health in the context of higher education. Honey Oberoi Vahali has been closely associated with the movement of the struggling people of Tibet for the last twenty-five years. Her book Lives in Exile: Exploring the Inner World of Tibetan Refugees (2009, 2021 Routledge) is an exposition detailing the on-going struggle of three generations of Tibetans living in India and also of Tibetan torture survivors. In this work she had tried to see how culture and psyche are interrelated and how Buddhism was experienced as a creative force in the mitigation of the refugee’s trauma. Her book Lives in Exile: Exploring the Inner World of Tibetan Refugees (2009, Routledge) is an exposition to this effect. She works with narratives, life histories and psychobiographies. From 2012 to 2015 she was the Dean of the School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.