Dr Niharika Pandit, BA (Sophia College, University of Mumbai), MA (SOAS), PhD (LSE)

Profile

Niharika joined the Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations in September 2023. She was previously a Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from where she received her PhD in September 2022.

Niharika’s research engages questions of gender, coloniality, militarisation/military occupations, carceral geographies and anticolonial politics. Her research, writing and teaching are rooted in liberatory feminist and queer thought, especially from marginal epistemic and political locations.

Her first book, Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2026) is an ethnographic account of the everyday politics of living through occupation and theorises how militarisation becomes a logic of coloniality in South-South relations.

She co-convenes BISA’s Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working group.

Office hour booking link.

Teaching

POL180 Global Sociology

POL274 Gender and Feminisms in World Politics

POLM106 Confronting Violence: Anticolonial Feminist and Queer Approaches

Research

Research Interests:

Niharika’s first book theorises enforced militarisation and military occupation of Kashmir as a logic of contemporary coloniality to examine how (post)colonial states wrest control by violently structuring the routine lives of those under occupation through spatial, embodied, affective, temporal and discursive capture. Yet, the resolute desire of a people to not be consumed by the overwhelming expanse of coloniality and occupation makes the everyday a fertile ground for anticolonial, possibly feminist, politics.

Niharika is currently working on a British Academy funded project that maps feminist imaginaries of anti-militarist and anti-capitalist resistance.

Her research interests include carceral geographies, feminist, gender and sexuality studies, anticolonial and abolitionist politics, postcolonialism/coloniality and creative methodologies.

Examples of research funding:

Examples of recent funding include the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant; IHSS ECR funding; Sociological Review Seminar series funding; Peace Research Grant; LSE PhD studentship and Felix scholarship.

Awards

LSE Class Teacher Award (Highly Commended) 2022, 2023

Feminist Theory Essay Prize 2022

Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section, ISA graduate paper runner-up prize for ‘Spacing Home Under Occupation’ 2022

LSE Student Union Teaching award nomination for Innovative Teaching 2022

Publications

Monograph

Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir, Oxford University Press 2026.

Journal Articles

A feminist analysis of the coloniality of militarization: thinking with Kashmir at the margins of the Global South, International Feminist Journal of Politics 2025, 27(1), 201–223. [Winner of Enloe Essay Prize 2023]

Enacting a politics of possibilities against Zulm and towards Azadi from coloniality and occupation, European Journal of Women’s Studies 2025, 32(2), 177-192.

Window: Spatializing Occupation, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2023, 9(1): 1–6.

Re-membering: Tracing Epistemic Implications of Feminist and Gendered Politics under Military Occupation, Feminist Theory 2023, 24(1): 102–122. [Winner of Feminist Theory 2022 Essay Prize]

Notes on Feminist Dissonance, Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research 2023, 15(1): 13–22. 

The Ghosts That Haunt Us: (Anti)Colonial Residues and Feminist Solidarity in Everyday Archives (co-authored with Samia Mehraj), Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research 2021, 7(1): 11–33. 

Reporting of Violence against Women in Indian Newspapers (co-authored with Amanda Gilbertson), Economic and Political Weekly 2019, 54(19): 41–48.

Special Issues

Against Violence: Anticolonial Feminist Methodologies, Pedagogies and Archival Interventions (with Priya Raghavan) for Journal of Gender Studies, 2026.

Book Chapter

Anti-gender and anti-feminist politics in India: Notes on fascism, feminist solidarity and liberatory politics (co-authored with Nolina Minj, eds. Aiko Holvikivi, Billy Holzberg and Tomas Ojeda) in Transnational Anti-Gender Politics by London: Palgrave, 2024.

Supervision

Currently co-supervising Claudia Huang, Maayan Ashash and Vanshika Bhatt.

Niharika welcomes students researching coloniality and settler colonialism; militarisation/military occupations; queer and feminist politics, social movements, carceral geographies, abolitionist approaches to state and South Asia.

Public Engagement

Niharika is involved in feminist and left organising spaces in India and London, co-runs Insurgent Knowledges, and organises political education and collective knowledge cultivation workshops with several education, art and activist collectives. She regularly writes on research and journalism platforms:

Imane Khelif: Refusing the violent fiction of binary gender, The Contrapuntal, August 2024

Imagining another university through feminist pedagogies, with Aiko Holvikivi, Engenderings, February 2022

Words in Between, an ethnographic story for Otherwise Magazine, November 2021

Collaborative writing, collective writing: Notes on Methodology, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, September 2021

Invited contribution on Bollywood and the Banality of Militarization for Association of Political and Legal Anthropology’s Speaking Justice to Power Series, which focuses on Kashmir and marks the one-year anniversary of the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, August 2020

Pandemic-As-War: A Narrative That Makes Lives Expendable And Widens Socio-Political Inequalities, The Polis Project, July 2020

Dismantling Home, Building Bridges, an invited contribution for Feminist Review’s Confronting the Household blog series, June 2020

Anti-colonial feminist solidarity and politics of location on Engenderings, January 2020

In 2022, she was the Research Network Coordinator of AHRC-LSE project on Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions.