Meghna Roy

• Roy, Meghna (2026). Trouble in Paradise: ‘Capacity to Aspire’ among Northeast Indian Migrants in Bengaluru's Wellness Industry. Anthropology in Action. ISSN 0967-201X. 32(1), p. 38–43. doi: 10.3167/aia.2025.320106. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Using themes and narratives from The White Lotus , this article ethnographically examines the positioning of migrants from Northeast India within the labour hierarchies of Bengaluru's wellness industry. It explores two trajectories: middle-class counsellors whose therapeutic expertise constitutes emotional labour, and working-class service providers – hairdressers and masseuses – whose labour combines touch and scripted care. Northeastern migrants are sought after for their perceived docility, English fluency and ‘Asian’ appearance, yet racialised biases limit their access to higher-status wellness professions requiring academic credentials. While pathways for self-making exist, the industry's promises of self-work and professional advancement remain unequally distributed. This analysis highlights how race, region and class shape the ‘capacity to aspire’ in urban contexts, positioning the wellness industry as a significant site for aspirational self-making.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Does India need saving from psychotherapy? Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 41(5), p. 7–10. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.70028. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  That psychotherapy is colonial is a prevailing stance within and beyond psychology in India. Such a position risks aligning with essentialist binaries like ‘East/West’ espoused by Hindu nationalism. Although its practice began in the Indian subcontinent during the late colonial period, examining the history of psychotherapy suggests that it was more than merely a ‘Western’ import. Ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews at a psychotherapy training programme in Bengaluru show that the contemporary practice of psychotherapy in India similarly resists such accusations of colonization. New entrants into India's urban middle classes are enthusiastically opting for therapy. Reading their participation as a continuation of colonization would deny them agency and potentially erase their capacity to define what decolonizing means to them. Furthermore, erstwhile colonies may be internally varied through differentials of power, thus making ‘coloniality’ a condition that cannot be easily divided into clear divisions between the Global South and the Global North.

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• Roy, Meghna (2026). Benson, Peter. Stuck moving: or, how I learned to love (and lament) anthropology. xvi, 380 pp., bibliogr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. £25.00 (paper). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. ISSN 1359-0987. doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.70170. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2026). Det er en forskjell mellom en indisk kokk og en indisk ingeniør. doi: https:/www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/i/K869pX/det-er-en-forskjell-mellom-en-indisk-kokk-og-en-indisk-ingenioer. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Norway's public debate on the deportation of Indian chefs has framed the issue primarily as a challenge to the labour market, arguing that the country risks losing skilled workers it cannot afford to lose. This op-ed argues that this framing misses the point. The chefs in question are not failing to be recognised as economic resources — they are already valued precisely because they are legible as authentically Indian. Unlike engineers, whose ethnicity is incidental to their professional value, the chefs' ethnicity is the product itself. The piece argues that advocating for migrants' right to remain on grounds of economic utility does not challenge the logic that makes them deportable — it reinforces it. What is absent from the debate is a simpler and more important argument: that lawful presence, work, and dignity ought to constitute a sufficient human claim to remain, independent of labour market calculus.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Making futures legible: how counselling trainees mobilize the figure of the doctor in India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper asks: how do trainee counsellors in India craft their future professional identities amid uncertain infrastructures of care? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a postgraduate counselling psychology programme in a private university run by an indigenous congregation in Bengaluru, I consider training as a speculative, futures-making practice. In the absence of state regulation, trainees mobilize the culturally authoritative figure of the doctor to render their occupation socially legible. Many had once aspired to become doctors and now position themselves in relation to biomedicine to claim legitimacy and articulate their work to family and peers. Through a person-centred ethnography of one trainee, I examine how therapeutic sensibilities are cultivated alongside aspirations, anxieties, and moral imaginaries shaped by India's privatized healthcare landscape. Trainees fear their profession may follow the medical path toward exclusionary, commodified care, even as they invoke its authority. By reframing treatment difference as a treatment gap, they promote awareness and help produce an emergent ontology of mental health. I argue that the ambiguity of their professional status opens a space for ethical world-making—where counselling is not yet fixed, and its meanings are shaped by those training to embody it.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Blending Art and Science - American Ethnological Society. doi: https:/americanethnologist.org/online-content/blending-art-and-science-by-meghna-roy/. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The essay reflects on ethnographic fieldwork in a counseling psychology program in Bengaluru, where the author participates in professional development exercises and therapy simulations while studying trainee counselors. As she shares her own history of depression and family life, the boundary between researcher and participant blurs, making vulnerability mutual rather than one-sided. Through classroom reflections, role-plays, and group discussions on PhD mental health, fieldwork becomes a space of intervention that reshapes the author’s sense of self as much as it generates data. The piece argues that ethnography, like psychotherapy, “blends art and science” by demanding emotional exposure, relational care, and a willingness for the researcher to be transformed by the field.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Mind the Culture, episode 1: What do you mean Psychological Anthropology? – European Network for Psychological Anthropology. doi: https:/open.spotify.com/episode/799Y0V3Zl4exIXG8U9FoKn?si=JScY_NxhSXSTC9PDwj_NfQ. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this episode, Meghna Roy (University of Oslo) is in conversation with Mayssa Rekhis (University of Gothenburg; programme director at the time of recording) and Thomas Stodulka (University of Münster) to explore the significance of psychological anthropology as a critical public endeavour. The guests discuss their personal journeys with the subject, the formation of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology, and the ethical implications of fieldwork.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Child is the mother of woman: The Making of the Self at a Counselling Training Programme in India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this presentation, I ask how the self of the trainee is shaped by psychological counselling as a technology of the self. The average trainee is a privileged caste middle-class woman in early twenties. Hence, the common discourse in India is that psychotherapy makes a person self-indulgent leading to disintegration of the family. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork at a postgraduate programme in Counselling Psychology in southern India, I observe that the trainee views her identity as an extension of or in opposition to her family members. During self-work, or inner work mandated in training, the individual trainee often seeks to transform her self in relation to her family. Amid widespread stigma associated with psychological taxonomies of mental illness in South Asia, trainees use counselling practice “to break the pattern.” Pattern refers to the layered subjugation of gender, caste, class, religious and ethnolinguistic minorities as well as patterns of the self that do not serve her anymore. Trainees attempt to repair what they perceive as fractured personhood of significant others in family by means of self-reflection. In self-work, trainees may at once assume identities of their grandmothers, mothers and themselves. Enmeshment with family members as a source of their suffering and identity thus reveals family life as integral to becoming a counsellor.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). The making of moral futures among psychotherapeutic trainees in India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper considers how psychotherapeutic trainees discern everyday morality. I ask: What does making morality in anticipation of future practice reveal about an emergent subjectivity informed by psychotherapy? I draw from ethnographic fieldwork at a psychotherapeutic training program in a privately funded university managed by a Christian Trust in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), the capital of Karnataka in southern India. Most of the trainees in this programme moved to Bengaluru in their twenties to undergo training that culminates in a master’s degree in counselling psychology. Through mandatory ‘self-work’ trainees mobilize the science of psychology to make and unmake the contours of private morality as they prepare for professional practice in India where psychotherapy is not yet regulated by the state. While ethical codes of practice developed in the United States are available to trainees, trainees produce viable moral standards of practice in India in the absence of a regulatory body. Trainees adapt seemingly universal scientific values to the local context of private psychotherapy practice in urban India. Existing caste, ethnolinguistic and religious diversity within the classroom is perceived as an advantage to be leveraged upon. On the other hand, diversity is perceived as a challenge to be overcome in future ‘multicultural’ practice. This paper is about how trainees negotiate their private morals in the shape of an imagined future.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). "Break the cycle:" Making of the self at a counselling training institute in India. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2022). Needles, Blood, and Data: The Case of COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects. Economic and Political Weekly. ISSN 0012-9976. 57(37), p. 13–16. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2022). The Biomedical Empire: Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. By B. K. Rothman, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2021. pp. 164. $14.00 (pbk). ISBN: 978-1-5036-2881-6. Sociology of Health and Illness. ISSN 0141-9889. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.13580. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2022). Nostalgia, Belonging, and Healing: Thinking about Thinking of Him. Economic and Political Weekly. ISSN 0012-9976. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2021). Fat Planet: Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital Eds. Eillen P. Anderson-Fye and Alexandra Brewis, 2017, Fat Planet: Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital, Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-82635-800-4. Anthropology Book Forum. ISSN 2380-7725. Full text in Research Archive

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