Khyati Tripathi
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Khyati Tripathi is a psychologist and anthropologist by training with over thirteen years of research experience in death studies. She is currently a research associate at Harvard and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the South Asia Institute, Harvard University, in January 2023. Previously, she was selected for the Commonwealth Scholarship (2016–17), which enabled her to pursue her PhD in split-site mode at the University of Delhi as well as the University of London. Khyati uses a multi-disciplinary lens spanning psychology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis to look at different aspects of death. For her PhD, she focused on the cultural construction of dead bodies through death rituals and mortuary techniques in Hinduism and Judaism. |
Through the autoethnographic aspects of her research in death studies, Khyati aims to discuss how death and suffering within the cultural, institutional, and ritual-based spaces associated with death have varied meanings. While dissecting these spaces to understand the specifics, she will present an anatomy of suffering (in the context of death and dying) and the nature of its interaction with these (in)tangible spaces to argue for a non-absolute and dynamic relationship between spaces (associated with death) and suffering. This is a relationship that rests on an interplay of overt (e.g., socio-cultural) and covert (e.g., psychological) factors vital to exploring the experiences of suffering, the witnessing of it, and how it is responded to.