Biography

Dr Chetan Sinha is a Professor of Psychology at OP Jindal Global University (JGU), Sonipat. He has a Ph.D. from Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies (ZHCES) in Social Psychology of education from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is a senior research fellow at the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies (IDEAS) and the International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building (IIHEd), JGU. He is collaborating with Sociocultural Lab, Kings College London. He is working with Dr Apurv Chauhan on strategic risk-taking in health decisions among marginalized sections in India. Currently, he is acting as Academic Editor for PLOS One (Psychology section) and serving on Grant-in-Aid Committee Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI).

He is interested in researching the social psychology of education and organization from a social identity and representation perspective. Earlier, his research had extended to three interconnected domains: 1) Dynamics of educational leadership, 2) Psychology of social class and academic achievement, where he experimentally studied stereotype threat effect and 3) Social representations of academic achievement and failure. Specifically, he ventures into the critical aspects of social cognition, leadership, and power. Chetan expertise is in understanding the social psychology of power in the educational context. He worked with primary and elementary school children from low-income marginalized communities. He is interested in their academic identification, response to identity and stereotype threats and how academic achievement and failure are socially represented. He worked on the children of the weaver community in Varanasi and their pathways to cross the boundary of being from the working class. He is working on the children of displaced migrant workers, the meaning of play and inclusive playgrounds. His effort is to understand how these children create playgrounds of resistance in the face of everyday discrimination as a response to cross the ascriptive barriers of imposed social identity and create a new identity. He taught Social Psychology, Organizational Behaviour/Principles of Management, Educational Psychology and History and Philosophy of Psychology. In JGLS, he takes electives such as Critical Psychology of Law, Psychological Jurisprudence and Neuroscience. He recently published a monograph titled The power dynamics of education: shaping the structure of school education in India with Routledge.

Earlier, he worked as a researcher at H&SS, IIT Delhi and as an assistant director and researcher at the Centre for Post-colonial Education, NIRMAN Varanasi. Before joining JGU, Dr Chetan taught psychology to graduate and post-graduate students at Christ University Bengaluru. He has also taught at Amity Institute of Psychological Science-Amity University. He also worked as a postgraduate teacher in a school teaching psychology. He is invited to major conferences, seminars, and forthcoming workshops as a resource person. Prominent among them were in STAR Scholar Conference 2023, Cherion-The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Mississippi State University-(2017) and Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus in New York City-2023; AASJ, Bangalore, 2023, IIT Delhi; Trnava University and Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava; IPLS, Mykonos; International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), Lisbon (2019), Montreal, (2023); Department of Psychology, Christ University; Soumya Vidyavihar University, Mumbai (2021); CUHK, Hong Kong. Currently, he is a member of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). Chetan has acted as an external examiner for PhD thesis at Jawaharlal Nehru University and as a resource person to Christ University, NCR, Delhi.