Kumar Ravi Priya, Ph.D.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur,
Kanpur – 208016
Uttar Pradesh, INDIA

Email: krp@iitk.ac.in

Dr. Kumar Ravi Priya has been serving as an associate professor of psychology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, since March, 2012. Besides teaching, his passion also includes conducting research in the domain of disaster mental health from a social constructionist standpoint. His focus in research is not only to understand the trauma reactions through the medicalized concepts such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) amongst the victims of the survivors but the often-marginalized experiences of suffering and healing within the post-disaster socio-political and cultural contexts.

Dr. Priya earned his Ph.D. from the University of Delhi in 2007 and his doctoral work was focused on understanding the processes of suffering and healing of the survivors of the earthquake that struck the Kachchh district of Gujarat, India, on 26 January, 2001. He conducted this ethnographic study by attempting to understand the experiences of survivors in the dynamic socio-political and cultural post-disaster contexts. He spent more than four months of time amongst the survivors to conduct this study during the three phases of fieldwork between 2001 and 2005. Currently he is conducting a project in India to understand the suffering and healing processes of the survivors of Post-Godhra riots and the Nandigram social movement against the land acquisition by the state.

Dr. Priya has authored four entries into the Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Psychology (Wiley-Blackwell, USA). Some of the reputed international journals that he has published his research work in are Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Health Research and Qualitative Research in Psychology. Recently, he has co-edited a book titled, Qualitative Research on Illness, Wellbeing and Self-Growth: Contemporary Indian Perspectives (Routledge).