Paras Arora

Paras Arora is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. As an anthropologist, Paras is particularly committed to understanding how care performed at the level of familial and kin relations might escape, resist, and reformulate broader political and economic shifts across societies. As a visual artist, Paras is drawn to care precisely because of its ethical uncertainty that is often failed by language. Their doctoral research attends to how families grapple with the ageing and continued dependency of autistic adults in the absence of state-mandated, social support in India. In this project, they seek to theorize autism as a shared condition, care as an experiment in ethics, and family as a contested mode of collective being in India. 

Paras' research has been supported by the King Center on Global Development, Society for Psychological Anthropology, Robert Lemelson Foundation, Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, & Fondation pour l’étude des relations internationales en Suisse. For their tremendous service and dedication in providing excellent classroom instruction for Stanford students, they were awarded with the Centennial Teaching Award by the Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences in 2023. 

Paras has also held the graduate coordinator position for the South Asia Working Group at the Stanford Center for South Asia, the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop in Medical Humanities at the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Anthropology Brownbag at Stanford Anthropology. They hold an M.A. degree in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies, Geneva, and a B.A. degree with Honours in Political Science from Hindu College, University of Delhi.