Dissertation
Against Debility: Life-making and Care for Mandbuddhi across Panjab and British Columbia
PhD Dissertation, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia
2024–2029 (expected)
This dissertation examines how Panjabi families understand and organize care for kin with mandhbuddhi (intellectual and developmental disabilities), working across two transnational field sites: Panjab, India, and British Columbia, Canada.
Group of women walking outskirts a factory. Jandiala Guru, Panjab, India, 2026.
The project's starting point is personal before it is theoretical. Raised in Goindval, Amritsar district, Panjab, I grew up in the long aftermath of 1984, where I first watched how debility gets structurally managed: who receives care, who is concealed, and whose suffering goes unacknowledged. Years later, working as a certified medical interpreter, I sat with Panjabi families receiving diagnoses they had no community language to process, and watched them ask how to hide a diagnosis rather than how to support their child. That gap between the clinical encounter and the community reality is where this research lives.
Theoretically, the dissertation puts Jasbir Puar's concept of debility, incapacity produced by structural violence and neglect, rather than an individualized or purely medical category, into conversation with Neferti Tadiar's concept of life-making: the labour through which people sustain and remake life under conditions of dispossession. Together, these frameworks reorient the question away from disability as a fixed diagnostic category and toward care as something families actively assemble across borders, migration regimes, and health systems that were not built with them in mind.
Methodologically, the project draws on transnational ethnography, medical anthropology, and feminist political economy, integrated with arts-based and community-engaged research (ABER) and multilingual, culturally grounded methods. A central output is a set of bilingual toolkits for Panjabi-speaking families navigating neurodevelopmental and intellectual disability systems in British Columbia built not as translations but as transcreations, reconstructing meaning across knowledge systems rather than converting language line by line. These tools are being tested simultaneously in Panjab, so the learning moves in both directions between diaspora and homeland.
Doctoral research is funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.