डॉ. बी. आर. अम्बेडकर विश्वविद्यालय दिल्ली 
INTRODUCTION
The School of Human Studies at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi is an explorative space where a self-reflective version of psychological enquiry is encouraged. The Psychology programmes within the School have a strong interdisciplinary orientation where questioning the status quo is valued and the voice of experience, especially from peripheral locations, is foregrounded. Knowledge from the unconscious is considered crucial with an emphasis on social justice, empathy, imagination, and the place of playfulness in human life. In keeping with the above concerns, the Doctoral Programme in Psychology promotes active involvement with diverse forms of life across various cultural settings. The PhD programme is premised on a psychosocial research framework that focuses on grasping the subtleties of human subjectivity in socio-historical contexts and explores the complexities, dilemmas, resilience, life choices, and conflicts within participants' experiential worlds. The choice of methods encourages ethical engagement, especially with forms of life and cultural/collective modes rendered invisible and voiceless by dominant discourses and politico-social structures and processes. Guided by a perspective that constantly seeks to question both knowledge and power — orienting towards an intersubjective worldview within which affects, feelings, and the phenomenological flow of life are received—the programme seeks to inculcate in prospective researchers a nuanced sensibility along participatory and dialogical lines. Research in this mode welcomes the possible avenues through which the unknown (often preserved as the ‘excess’ and the ‘initially incomprehensible’ in the data) gradually unfolds in significance within the relational space between the researcher and her participants.
In such research, the self of the researcher serves as an instrument through which processes of interpretation and meaning-making are filtered, even as the momentum of work oscillates between recognition of self-reflexive moments in which awareness of “sameness and otherness” leads to a deepening and broadening of human relatedness
Serving life and its struggles, and focusing on qualitative work in which sustained engagement is valued and the transformative potentials in the selves of the researcher and the researched are opened up, the doctoral programme seeks to acquaint students with thinkers and researchers whose efforts align with the above objectives. Over time, the programme has expanded to explore the relationships and interconnections between quantitative and qualitative research, while also considering mixed-methods approaches. With these extensions the aim is to prepare students for interdisciplinary inquiry, with integrative training paths enabling them to also invest in empirical, evidence-based research using the rigor of qualitative and mixed-method approaches.
In an overall sense, the PhD Programme in Psychology prepares researchers to ask searching questions; to meditate on fieldwork and chosen methodological perspectives by situating their work within a socio-culturally relevant framework. In this sense, the course work serves as a space for focused reflection on the triad critical-clinical-cultural. Contributions from psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, cultural and critical psychology, literature, aesthetics, history, political theory, sociology and anthropology are intricately interwoven into the curriculum, just as narratives, life histories, psycho-biographies and case studies suggest future directions for work to be undertaken
The aims of the programme are as follows:
- To contribute to the rich and developing field of Psychosocial Clinical Studies through interdisciplinary research and writing.
- To delve into writing from India and South Asia for developing psychosocial research.
- To develop links between psychoanalysis and critical thinking relevant to India.
- To develop links between clinical psychoanalysis, phenomenology and critical psychology.
- To research peripheral lives and unexplored spaces of lived experience.
- To use qualitative methods of enquiry that reclaim subjectivity along with critical textual analysis
- To equip with utilizing a mixed-methods approach to strategically combine both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis within a single study or series of studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of complex research problems.
- To explore forms of listening to self and others.
- To develop writing styles that foreground the intersubjective nature of psychosocial enquiry.
Faculty: