About the Guest: 

 Zehra Mehdi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Religion, Columbia University working at the intersections of religion, politics, and psychoanalysis. Her doctoral dissertation studies how Muslims as persecuted religious minorities in India draw upon religion to perform the psychic work of verbalizing trauma, mourning losses, as well as staging political protest.  Her research interests are political psychology, religious minorities and nationalism, trauma and violence, gender theory, psychoanalytic anthropology, and Partition literature. She has written articles in psychoanalytic journals on Islamophobia and secular psychoanalysis in India and contributed chapters in edited volumes on Winnicott and political theory, psychoanalysis and literature, and religious-political identities in the clinic. Her forthcoming articles are on psychoanalysis and nationalism in India, listening to injustice, and the need for political psychoanalytic anthropology. 

This series is hosted by Saransh Bisht, mental health collective associate at Belongg. They are also a mental health practitioner who works extensively with queer persons on various psycho-social themes. In 2019 they co-founded queer listening circle to enable healing spaces among community spaces.

You can also listen to this and more by downloading Belongg’s app UnOther, spelt U_N_O_T_H_E_R which is available on both the Apple and Google app stores. To invite such experts to your organization for guest lectures or expert consultations, please also look at Belongg Circle, a platform that curates intersectional experts and makes it easy for a range of organizations to integrate such thinking in their work.