Paras Arora

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

A Home Away from Home: Tracing the Rise of Family-Led Institutional Care for Autistic Adults in Delhi, India

As the earliest diagnosed autistic children in India began entering their adulthood in the 2010s, their families began experimenting with the routines, locations, and temporalities of care that now had to be curated for autistic children as adults. In the absence of state-mandated welfare support, these familial experiments with care have taken the shape of residential care facilities across all major Indian cities as “assisted living centers” for autistic individuals and “respite care programs” for their families. Arora’s project seeks to ethnographically study this model of family-led or family-informed institutional care for autistic individuals as a social intervention into systemic healthcare deficiencies from below.


 

Paras Arora, Department of Anthropology

Paras Arora is a second-year PhD student at the department of anthropology, Stanford University. Working at the intersections of socio-cultural, medical, psychological, and multimodal anthropology, Arora is deeply interested in investigating how care-work, performed at the level of family and kinship as social institutions, might escape, resist, and reformulate broader political and economic shifts across societies. Arora's doctoral project looks at how, in the absence of state-mandated social support, the families of disabled individuals in India, are collectively experimenting with their individual responsibilities to care by expanding the limits of what it means to be a family. 

Arora holds a BA with Honors in political science from the University of Delhi, and an MA in anthropology & sociology from the Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies, Geneva, where they were a Hans Wilsdorf and FERIS scholar.

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