Intellectual Disability in the Global South Session 2: Care, Families, and Institutions

The Intellectual Disability Social Research Lab (IDSRL) is an international network of researchers hosted and funded by the University of Amsterdam. The network is made up of people from a wide range of nationalities, career stages, neurodiversities and disabilities. We place a particular emphasis on mentoring graduate students and junior researchers. This second part turns to the relationships between disability, family life, care, and intervention in India and China. Through research on neurodiversity, autism, intellectual disability, parenting, and care, the speakers explore how families navigate everyday responsibilities, forms of interdependence, and the wider social worlds in which disability is understood and supported. Presentations Paras Arora, Stanford University Familial Adjustments with Intellectual Disability in Neurodiverse India Zhixin Wan, University of Oxford Moving for Intervention: Autism, Families, and the Making of a Disability Community in Urban China Priyasha Choudhary and Shubha Ranganathan, IIT Hyderabad Mothering and Care in the Context of Autism and Intellectual Disability in India: Narratives of Interdependence Speakers Paras Arora is an award-winning anthropologist, artist, and writer from Delhi and Stanford. A Ph.D. Candidate in socio-cultural & medical anthropology at Stanford University, they have been researching neurodiversity, family life, and future planning in India since 2018. As a sibling caregiver and neurodivergent scholar themselves, Paras is committed to foregrounding neurodiverse siblings’ experiences of care and intimacy across the life course. For their scholarship’s potential in breaking new humanistic and social scientific grounds, they were one of the first Indian scholars to be awarded the Mellon/ACLS Innovation Fellowship. Zhixin Wan is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Rhodes Scholar from China. Her multi-sited ethnographic research examines how Chinese parents of children with learning disabilities negotiate intervention, advocacy, and the everyday labor of inclusion. Priyasha Choudhary is a researcher exploring the intersections of disability, gender, sexuality, and care in India. She is a part-time Research Assistant at the University of Amsterdam and has worked as a Research Associate at IIT Hyderabad, contributing to projects on intellectual disability, gender, and long-term care. Trained in social science, she draws on critical disability studies, medical anthropology, kinship, and feminist ethnography to examine how ableism and patriarchy shape care and kinship. Her research is guided by critical and rights-based perspectives, centring lived experiences and feminist methodologies. Shubha Ranganathan is an associate professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her strengths lie in employing qualitative approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives in research projects in (mental) health, gender, and disability. She has studied local healing practices among marginalised groups as well as mental health and disability-related issues in India. Grounded in critical and social justice perspectives, her work focuses on lived experiences and the role of advocacy for social change. She is exploring questions about parenting and care in the context of autism as part of her engagement with the neurodiversity discourse.