This creative thesis is a product of my discomfiting inability to categorize social activism as an impersonal, distant, and un-affecting phenomenon. On the contrary, the ripples of the emerging political unrest in my country have overwhelmed my personal, social, and familial reality. I have used auto theory as a form of creative expression in this thesis to communicate how the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizenship in India shattered the deceptive divide between affect, politics, culture, and community. Indulging myself in scavenging through familial and national histories, I have attempted to uncover what citizenship means for a country traumatized by the violence of colonialism, Partition, and religious antagonism. Furthermore, I explore how social media provided a peculiar window for Indians to witness the uncovering of previously camouflaged religious nationalism. Paying heed to the legacy of auto theory in feminist, queer, anti-racist, and anti-colonial writing, I also make space for the implications of the gendered and religiously motivated assaults on the protestors and dissenting voices. This thesis is a provocative demand that urges its readers to sit with the uneasiness of confronting their emotions, politics, and intergenerational trauma when challenged with questions of what it means to belong to a country, a nation, a community, and a people. It is also an exercise of self-reflection as I injure myself by poking at these questions and my experience of privilege, suffering, pain, and freedom in a country engulfed in rising authoritarianism.

A two-part interview podcast on psychiatric care in a small city in Haryana, produced with the help of a grant awarded by the Ideosync UNESCO Information Fellowship (IUIF). Each story in the series is told across a pair of episodes. The first is an extended interview with a person seeking or receiving psychiatric treatment, in which they account their journey to the psychiatric clinic - what they understand to be their reason behind seeking care, what reasons may have led them to this point, and what help (or lack thereof) do they recieve from their treatment. The second episode interviews the psychiatrist treating them about the same situation: the psychiatrist's diagnostic reasoning, their sense of what led the person to the clinic, and their assessment of what recovery would look like. The project aimed to juxtapose these two narratives without presenting one as more correct or objective over the other. Instead, it attemps to look at the overlaps and contradictions between lived experience and diagnositic categorization to understand better how structures of gender, class, caste, and politics intersects with the mental health care.