Arita Balaram / Critical Social Personality Psychology
Graduate Student Researcher
October 2018 – June 2020abalaram@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Project: Cultivating a women and femme-centered intergenerational oral history project
NML Awards: The New Media Lab Digital Dissertation Award (May 2020), The Social Justice Award (January 2019)
Arita Balaram is a PhD student in the Critical Social/Personality Psychology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is interested in stories that circulate within diasporic communities, across migratory geographies, and through generations. Her past research has integrated visual methodologies such as identity mapping to explore how Indo-Caribbean youth in the U.S. engage in acts of self-assertion and recovery in contexts where ideas of home, belonging, and community have been contested for generations. More broadly, she is interested in the utility of psychological theory for doing community-building and healing work.
Her dissertation project seeks to develop a digital archive of the stories of Indo-Caribbean women and femmes across generations. She is excited about learning more about archiving and oral history methods as she moves forward with this work.