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Dr Rakshi Rath is a social and political psychologist. She earned her PhD from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. She worked with Professor Stephen Reicher and her PhD was fully funded by the School.
Framed by the theoretical rigour of the social identity approaches, her research enquires into the conditions of mobilisations of hate and solidarity. Her PhD data consisted of rhetoric and visual culture, speeches, posters, ethnographic approaches and experimental methods in exploring processes of hate mobilisation. Her work on intergroup hatred has informed the development of a model of collective hate in a seminal paper co-authored with Reicher and Haslam (representative publication). Trained at a post-graduate level in qualitative and quantitative approaches, Dr Rath works with multiple methods in exploring social phenomena and formulating questions of research.
Dr Rath’s work is also practice-led, and she works in collaboration with peace activists and artists towards subverting categories of hate and developing solidarity. This strand of her research is in exploring the dynamics of social solidarities, extending practices towards building communities of care with a focus on accessibility and rights-based approaches to counselling. She was one of the participants in the first cohort of mental health practitioners trained in Queer Affirmative Counselling Practises by the Mariwala Health Initiative, Mumbai and is currently in training as a Narrative practitioner. Her work in community mental health is also informed and developed with Pratap Kumar Rath in the Utkal-OLS approach to counselling underpinned by right to life with dignity.
Dr Rath holds a Masters in Psychology from the University of Delhi, and a BA (Honours) in Psychology from Utkal University.
