Hey. I’m Chindi.
Lavengri. Filidh. Drabarni. Final girl. Hermit.
CSA trafficking survivor. Trauma specialist.
Philosophy PhD student (AHRC)
💙❤️💚Rromni/Kamilaroi🖤💛❤️
My PhD is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s DTP programme and is based at the universities of Southampton and Cardiff.
My thesis is about birth, death, and existence.
In Western philosophy, we have historically focused a lot on death as something that brings meaning to life.
That argument roughly goes: life is meaningful because it is finite; death is what makes life finite; therefore, death is what makes life meaningful. But finite things have two ends: death, yes, but also birth.
Could it be, therefore, that we have focused so much on the existential implications of our relationship with death that we have forgotten to consider how our relationship with the beginning of life impacts our ways of being in the world?
That’s what I’m setting out to explore. Looking at concepts such as Heidegger’s Dasein; uncanniness, horror and absurdity; in-between-ness; and what it means to be a self, I am examining the ontological significance of pregnancy and childbirth.
The Death Cluster
Within the AHRC’s Doctoral Training Partnership, we have these things called ‘clusters.’ They’re basically groups of people who are interested in the same sorts of things, who gather together every so often to do activities around a theme.
The theme of the cluster I run is ‘death,’ because of course it is.
I am mostly housebound, so the majority of our events take place online. Every so often we’ll meet and discuss a topic related to death or mortality. This could be inspired by a film, a book, a research paper, a social media post, or just a topic someone’s been thinking about. If you’re interested in taking part, sign up for the newsletter below and follow @ahrcdeath on Instagram for updates.
Diversity & Inclusion Advocacy
The DTP has a steering group of diversity and inclusion advocates. We meet online every few weeks to work out ways to make life easier for people who have historically been marginalised at a doctoral training level.
I qualify for this via lived experience in a few different ways:
disabled
Romani
first-generation university-goer
grew up poor
grew up in a religious cult that discouraged university attendance
child sex trafficking survivor
LGBT+
For obvious reasons, I am also passionate about how most of us have various needs that intersect with, and sometimes clash with, each other.
Technically I suppose my Aboriginal Australian heritage would also count towards this, however given that I didn’t grow up on Country I don’t feel I can claim it. I am, however, more than happy to advocate for Aboriginal people to be included at doctoral level and am always keen to learn how to make PhD and post-doc spaces more inclusive in general, for everybody.
I trained as an existential psychotherapist (MA, PGCEP), but that label has been sitting uncomfortably with me for a while. There’s so much in psychotherapy that’s built upon harmful norms: colonialism, homophobia, racism, white supremacy. Recently the largest of the governing bodies wrote into their constitution that it’s OK to practise conversion therapy on trans people, i.e. to make them not be trans anymore. Which is impossible, and also barbaric.
And don’t get me started on the commercialisation of “wellness.”
What I do know about, though, is trauma. Both from my personal experience and from my professional life. Within psychotherapy, the thing I immediately did best was work with people who have been through childhood trauma.
And now that I’m not taking on therapy clients, I’m doing some advocacy work around helping other professionals to work with people who have post-traumatic symptoms and/or medical conditions.
Everything Else
Drabarni
What Else Do I Do?
Trauma Specialist
…is how I’m referred to in Romani. It’s a subset of ‘chovexani’ or ‘choxani,’ one of my family’s traditional ways of being. (See, even writing that sentence was hard because of how language has been colonised. 'Careers’ would just be wrong, because drabariphen is not just a career; it’s how you live your life. It’s how you wake up every day and make your coffee, how you decide what you’ll be doing that afternoon, how you communicate with friends and strangers alike.)
A drabarni might be roughly translated as a ‘healer.’ Some would say ‘witch,’ but it took me ages to get comfortable with calling myself that, because in the Romani culture I grew up in, we would never say that’s what we were. For us, witchcraft wasn’t some cute romantic thing that felt edgy and “cool.” It was our way of being, and it was a way of being that got us enslaved, banished and killed for hundreds of years. Luckily those days are over, in the UK at least, so I can read tarot to my heart’s content. You can book a reading here: