PhD Student
North America
I am a third-year PhD student in the North America field advised by Prof. Bernadette Peréz, with a specific focus on the histories of racialized and marginalized communities in California. My dissertation project historicizes the aftermath of California's deinstitutionalization movement in the 1960s, and the privatized system of care that emerged as a result. Moreover, I center the histories of racialized people with mental and cognitive disabilities to show how disability histories (often rendered as intrinsically "white" or "de-racialized") cannot be told separately from the vantage point of racialized, colonized, and debilitated communities. Positioning my work within an analysis of the quotidian violence that the American empire inflicts on multiple scales, I also argue that a history of California and its attendant systems of care and social control cannot be understood outside the fundamental political-economic reality of California as a bastion of militarism (in conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kelly Lytle Hernández, and Malcolm Harris, and others).
In addition to my dissertation, here are some other things I'm working on:
- I am editing a piece that I wrote last spring on the 1970 Augusta, Georgia Uprising. You can learn more about the Augusta uprising by listening to this podcast: https://www.gpb.org/podcasts/shots-in-the-back-exhuming-the-1970-augusta....
- Other articles in progress include a piece on the forcible administration of anti-psychotic medications and a paper on the Larry P. v. Riles court case and the fight by Black activists to end IQ testing for Black students in California.
- I also plan to start writing pieces soon on the history of weapons manufacturing in California; and on the University of California system and its central role in undergirding American imperialism.
Please reach out at taramadhav@berkeley.edu with questions or if I can be of any service to you. I also would love to provide any help with regards to the graduate school application process, career advice in and outside of graduate school, and being a second pair of eyes for your writing. I would be honored to talk to you and learn more about your work!
