Dr Parul Bansal is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, India’s premier liberal arts college, affiliated to the University of Delhi. She received a BA in psychology from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and an MA and a doctorate degree in psychology from the University of Delhi. Her teaching career spans over 15 years, during which she has served as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Lady Shri Ram College for Women. In addition, she has been actively involved with curriculum development and course writing at the University of Delhi and IGNOU. She has to her credit a well-received research text, using a psychoanalytically informed qualitative research methodology, titled Youth in Contemporary India: Images of Identity and Social Change. The text endeavours to be a study of identity in Indian urban youth, specifically in the context of the family, and reflects on the nature of intergenerational continuity and shifts in India. She understands psychology as an ‘amphibian discipline’, largely but not solely empirical, sharing porous borders with sociology, humanities and neurosciences and just as much a discursive construction as any other area of knowledge. A devoted teacher, her teaching is geared towards imbibing in students an active curiosity in understanding and critiquing ideological issues in psychology and fostering interest in epistemological and methodological pluralism. Her academic and research interests are in psychosocial studies of self, identity and social change, critical psychology, psychoanalysis and mental health, and qualitative research methodology. She was awarded Shashikala Singh Gold Medal for being a topper of University of Delhi in her Masters. She has also received ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship to conduct her PhD work.
