Understanding Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Society: Psychological Insights and Reflections

Contents: Foreword by Girishwar Misra. Preface and Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. 2. Everything That We Could Carry: Understanding Vulnerabilities in Refugees/Pallavi Ramanathan and Nandita Babu. 3. Growing Up Asian-Indian in USA: Identity Development and Psychosocial Adaptation/Revathy Kumar and Sarita Y. Shukla. 4. Mental Health Vulnerabilities of the Third-Gender Community/Divyani Khurana and Ishita U. Bharadwaj. 5. Voicing Vulnerabilities Around ‘Caste’ Stigma: A Qualitative Study/Ritu Singh and Alka Bajpai. 6. Psychological Trauma in Child Sexual Abuse: Withstanding Vulnerability and Nurturing Resilience/Sujata Satapathy and Rajesh Sagar.7. Invulnerable Parkinson’s Caregivers: An Existential Phenomenological Perspective/Supreet Kaur Bhasin and Ishita U. Bharadwaj. 8. Positive Deviance: Use of Phenomenon in Vulnerability to Depression/Rajbir Singh, Lokesh Gupta and Dinesh Chhabra. 9. Women and Work in Post-reform India: Reality of Vulnerability and Exclusion/Padmini Ravindra Nath and Chandrika Soni. 10. Vulnerabilities of Desire: A Qualitative Study with Indian Housewives/Annie Baxi. 11. Reflections on Psychic Pain around (In)Fertility and ‘Being’ of a Woman/Ishita U. Bharadwaj. 12. The Experience of Vulnerability and Resilience of Adolescent Girls in Slums/Nandita Babu and Varuni Sethi. 13. Managing Vulnerabilities of Institution Building and Organizational Change: The Role of Trust/Nidhi Prakash. Index.

Understanding Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Society: Psychological Insights and Reflections explores the constructs of ‘vulnerability’, with an aim to move beyond the linguistic and normative appropriation of the word. It does this by uncovering diverse life experiences of varied individuals and communities who have largely remained unseen and unheard. With dynamically transitioning sociocultural circumstances, the boundaries demarcating the included versus the excluded, the accepted versus the unacceptable other, the endeared versus the disparaged continue to multiply. As we struggle with these numerous identities and categories, we are forced to encounter compounded vulnerabilities. The book explores the various ways in which an individual encounters and even embraces vulnerability in order to ensure survival.

To help readers arrive at a broad understanding of the many underlying concerns, the book explores diverse issues such as gender, sexuality, adolescence, child abuse, exploitation, forced migration and homelessness. Based on rigorous empirical work, using traditional and alternative approaches to inquiry, the book provides critical insights for psychosocial and clinical interventions and will especially be of interest to psychologists, therapists and counsellors.