Abstract: Mainstream psychological science has largely treated culture as a moderating variable rather than as a constitutive dimension of experience. This talk makes an empirical case for repositioning culture as foundational to the very structure of psychological phenomena and outlines a research programme developed at the intersection of cultural psychology, developmental science, and the social constructivist paradigm. The centrepiece of the talk is a recently published qualitative study of coping strategies among low-income urban Indian families in crisis situations. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis and coding triangulation, particular attention is given to the analytic process as a demonstration of both the rigour of qualitative inquiry and the substantive insights it generates. Converging across multiple studies, this body of work advances two interrelated contributions: conceptual frameworks that foreground cultural logics of lived experiences and methodological innovations relevant for culturally grounded psychological research. The final section presents current teaching and research at Ashoka University, where this vision has been extended through student-led research work. This talk concludes with a proposal for the Youth Mental Health and Resilience Lab, envisioned as a cross-disciplinary research programme designed to produce ecologically embedded evidence on youth mental health in India.

About the Speaker: Annie Baxi is a qualitative psychologist and Visiting Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Ashoka University, where she teaches Qualitative Research Methods, Developmental Psychology, and Psychology of Health and Illness. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Delhi (2022), where her doctoral research examined discourses of normalcy and madness in women's lives through a critical, cultural, and discourse-analytic framework. Prior to joining Ashoka, she served as an Assistant Professor at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi (2017–2024). In 2024, she completed advanced training at the Social and Cultural Psychiatry programme at McGill University, deepening her engagement with global mental health and arts-based research. Her recent research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Constructivist Psychology and Human Arenas, where she advances an emic understanding of mental health and coping. She has also contributed to methodological scholarship through work on creative and participatory research methods. She holds peer-reviewer positions at Qualitative Inquiry, the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and Psychological Studies, and works as a research consultant with several community mental health organisations, including Bapu Trust in Pune.

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