B02-04PM: Feminist Knowledge and Research Praxis: Postcolonial Mediations and Possibilities

Instructor

Akanksha Mehta & Niharika Pandit

A.Mehta@gold.ac.uk

Niharika Pandit: I am a feminist theorist interested in questions of gender, racialisation, post/coloniality, militarisation, everyday politics, and anticolonial epistemic and political potentialities of thinking from the Global South. I am Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. I am currently working on my first book titled ‘On the Politics of Living: Gender, Coloniality and Occupation in Kashmir’, which offers a careful theoretical account of the ongoing occupation and how it structures everyday living – the routine, the banal, the ordinary worlds – of Kashmiri Muslim subjects in spatial, temporal, embodied and affective ways that are mediated through the complexities of gender, racialisation and coloniality. The book is based on my PhD (LSE, 2022) that won the 2023 Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize by the British International Studies Association. My broader research maps anticolonial and liberatory feminist thought and praxis from the margins of the Global South, and engages with feminist and gender theory, feminist international politics and relations and de/postcolonial thought. I work and experiment with creative methodologies like patchwork ethnography, ephemeral archives, narrative and visual storytelling. My work has been published in a range of feminist journals like Feminist Theory; Catalyst; Kohl and I have received several prizes including the 2023 Feminist Theory Essay Prize; 2022 Honourable Mention for the Best Graduate Student Paper Award, International Studies Association; and 2022, 2023 Class Teacher awards by the London School of Economics and Political Science. With Akanksha Mehta, I co-founded and co-run the public and community education collective ‘Insurgent Knowledges’. Insurgent Knowledges dreams of free knowledge and critical exchange for all and believes in community education that is rooted in struggle, justice, and collective study. I am an editor of Engenderings and Otherwise Magazine, and write fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English and Hindi languages. Akanksha Mehta: I am a queer feminist educator, researcher, writer, photographer, and community organiser based in Southeast London and India. I am Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Gender, Race and Cultural Studies and the Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. My broader research uses narrative writing, ethnographic methods, visual practice, and feminist, queer, crip, postcolonial, and anti-caste theory to examine the gendered, sexed, and racialised workings of everyday political mobilisations, violence, settler colonialism, and nationalism. My doctoral dissertation Right-Wing Sisterhood (SOAS, 2017), which examined the everyday and transnational mobilisations and violence of women in the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the Israeli Zionist settler project in Palestine, won the 2018 Best Dissertation Award by the European International Studies Association. I am currently finishing a monograph that expands on the project and is under contract with Oxford University Press. My teaching, within and beyond the university, examines critical knowledge productions on race and racism, gender and sexuality, caste, and disability, and it centers grassroots organising, protest, and resistance, and radical crip and community-oriented pedagogies. I have won Student-Led Teaching Awards for ‘Challenging and Inspiring Teaching’ in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021, 2022 and have also written about pedagogy, care, institutional violence, higher education, research methods, and organising. I facilitate several community spaces of learning and education, including Insurgent Knowledges (co-plotted and co-run with Niharika Pandit) and the Crip Theory Reading Group. I am a member of the Feminist Review Editorial Collective and was awarded the Community Engagement Award by the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association in 2020.