Resilience is often framed as an individual’s ability to "bounce back" from crises. But what happens when resilience is not a choice, but a survival strategy? What happens when systems individuals are situated in do not allow them the scope to truly recover? This paper examines how Muslim students in Indian universities navigate everyday Islamophobia, expressed through religious microaggressions, systemic exclusion, and institutional neglect. While resilience is often portrayed as empowering, this study reveals that coping mechanisms—self-silencing, avoidance, hypervigilance, and modifying behavior to reduce visibility—are often exhausting, isolating, and detrimental to mental health and overall well-being.

Drawing from qualitative interviews, this study challenges the assumption that coping equals overcoming. Muslim students, particularly hijab-wearing women, experience hypervisibility and scrutiny, while others face subtler but persistent forms of exclusion and stereotyping—which varies based on their intersecting identities. Many students withdraw from campus life, move into Muslim-majority areas considering their safety, further exacerbating ghettoisation, or exert extra effort in academics to prove their worth. While some find solace in religious texts, history and prayers, they also grapple with self-blame, emotional exhaustion, and isolation.

This study highlights how institutional inaction forces resilience onto students—leaving them to navigate discrimination alone. While microaffirmations from peers and professors provide temporary relief, they do not address the structural roots of Islamophobia in universities. Furthermore, gender, class, caste and regional backgrounds shape these experiences, complicating simplistic narratives of resilience.

This paper reframes the crisis not as a moment to overcome, but as an enduring condition—one that students must navigate daily. By critically interrogating the limits of resilience, this paper calls for a shift in focus: from expecting individuals to cope to demanding systemic accountability in higher education. True hope does not lie in merely surviving, but in dismantling the structures that demand such survival.

Human emotions don’t oscillate in binary systems. There are grey areas and ambiguous emotions. This ambiguity is common in most emotional domains. Socially, some emotions are considered positive, while others are negative. Literature explores positive emotions like love, kindness, and tolerance, but negative emotions like hatred, aggression, and intolerance are less studied. This paper examines the role of hate and aggression in urban slums and Indian society. Psychoanalysis considers negative emotions, but the literature suggests that love and tolerance unite communities. However, this study claims that aggression and hatred can also bind communities against each other. What makes this hate so binding? It has a libidinal economy as its foundation, which positively correlates with hate. Children as young as five and six exhibit aggression and hatred. This study explores the connotations and implications of aggression and hatred in urban slums among children. It also examines why religions teach morality like “Love thy neighbour” despite the strong social glue of hate. Does this language arise from the impossibility of relationships and hopelessness? The study explores how different communities organize themselves around hatred while promoting harmony and love. It examines the vocabulary and conceptual categories used to define “otherness” and the libidinal economy that sustains these relations. The role of aggression and hate in further otherization is also investigated. The study questions the conceptual categories of “we versus they” and the origins of hatred in seemingly homogeneous and marginalized communities, such as slums. These questions will be discussed in the broader context of religious preaching and practice, particularly in light of the Christian admonition “Thou shalt love thy neighbour” and Hinduism cannon (वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्) “the world is a family”

This paper is the result of a long-term engagement with the children of the Valmiki community, historically known as sweeper communities.

The experience of inhabiting marginalised bodies within institutional spaces such as the Western University can be fraught with feelings of otherness and isolation. As women of colour in academia, our encounters with racism are not uncommon. Within the hierarchical structure of higher education, where socio-political inequalities are often overlooked and reproduced in relational encounters, collective discomfort around race frequently manifests in silences. Intolerable feelings of shame and guilt mean that racism is often relationally disavowed to restore psychic equilibrium (Layton 2006). The inescapable visibility of racial difference results in the violence in these moments being contained in racially marginalised bodies. Kartika was in her second year of working on her doctoral thesis when she was asked to elaborate on her difference. Rhea had just begun working on her PhD and was looking to explore the experience of South Asian trainee counsellors in the same university. Forging solidarities amongst the silences that they each met on their own journeys, a new alliance emerged – one that was political, personal and deeply healing. In this paper, we invite you to reflect with us as we bring our visceral, intimate and troubling encounters with racism within the university as early career researchers, and psychotherapists, using Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ (1987) to frame our relationship. We also bring our hope, our resistance and our friendship as we grapple with the (im)possibilities for repair within the Academy. Our paper engages with the theme of 'Crisis and Opportunity' to address how affective encounters with prevailing inequalities in institutional spaces, while deeply painful, can also hold opportunities for collective resistance and solidarities to emerge.

Keywords: Racism; Resistance; Repair; Solidarity; Academia

There is increasing polarisation all over the world, and it started in India from 2014 itself, with the election of a right wing government, and increasing Hindutva (Hindu right wing narratives). I would like to explore whether the polarized views held by Indians today have correlates with certain kinds of mental health implications - for example, the use of primitive defences or the lack of mentalization. It is possible that the hate-based messaging by demagogues is also targeted at people who might not have had the kind of upbringing that allows for nuance and a pro-social drive, due to intergenerational trauma in the families of origin. For example, historians in the psychiatry space (Jain & Sarin, 2018) find it particularly curious that the Partition of India is not mentioned in psychiatry history as a cultural event that can have mental health implications. It is possible that generally, such intergenerational traumatic histories are repressed and show up in the form of restrictive/abusive parenting which in turn leads to poor mental health and a susceptibility to fear based hate messaging by anti-social elements. I would like to do a literature review to find about links of these themes in existing psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature within the Indian mental health scenario. If the scope of the study allows, I would like to interview a small sample of people with polarised views and try to get a sense of their mental health (defences, low mentalization), parenting practices they were raised with, and their intergenerational histories, to see if any links emerge. My hope is that with or without the interviews, we are able to establish some links between clinical realities and social behaviour in the culture, as interventions might need to be designed at both levels to help alleviate the crisis in the present moment.