Arushi Sahay

Arushi’s research focuses on socio-political and cultural dimensions of reproduction,  specifically interested in population policy, family planning, contraception, and gender  relations. Her doctoral project investigates how female surgical sterilisation comes to be  enabled, elected, and enacted as the most prevalent mode of contraception in India.

Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a family planning clinic in urban  northwest India, her PhD thesis looks at the everyday uptake of female sterilisation at the  intersection of state population control projects, non-governmental and rights-based  organisations, clinical encounters and biomedical formulations of contraception and fertility,  gendered relations of reproductive labour, and contested postoperative imaginaries and  reproductive futures. Overall, the thesis eschews dominant binaries of sterilisation as either  ‘forced’ or ‘voluntary’ while also departing from the dominant formulation of the ‘dark past’ of  sterilisation and population control. Instead, it demonstrates the multiply situated logics of contemporary sterilisation-use in India that are bound in the everyday and ordinary  language, relationships, negotiations, imaginaries, and futurities of reproduction.