Profile
Niharika is a feminist theorist interested in questions of gender, racialisation, post/coloniality, everyday politics of living and epistemic and political potentialities of theorising from the Global South. Insistently interdisciplinary, her research, writing and teaching draw on transnational, anticolonial and liberatory feminist and queer thinking. Before joining SPIR in September 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science from where she received her PhD in September 2022.
Niharika is an editorial collective member of Engenderings and Otherwise Magazine. She is also Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Teaching
POL180 Global Sociology (module convenor)
POL109 Global Histories
Research
Research Interests:
Niharika is currently working on her first book titled On the Politics of Living: Gender, Coloniality and Occupation in Kashmir, which is an anticolonial feminist enquiry into everyday politics of living under occupation in the Kashmir valley and tracks questions of space, time, affect, embodiment and counterpolitics. On the Politics of Living 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. In thinking through the everyday as an emergent site of intersectional gendered struggles, this research maps coloniality of postcolonial nation-states, and the complex ways in which they deploy logics of gender, sexuality, racialisation and militarism. The book is based on her PhD thesis, which was named winner of the 2023 Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize by the British International Studies Association. Read a synopsis of the book project.
Niharika’s next project maps the political and epistemic possibilities opened up by the concept of Azadi deployed by several transnational gender and sexual rights, anticolonial and anti-authoritarianism social justice movements. Because Azadi is also a feminist imaginative stance, this research traces how, and on what terms, do differently marginalised communities articulate this ethical-political-epistemic imaginary. Going beyond Azadi’s descriptive potential or its limited translation as ‘freedom’, this research will draw on Niharika’s ongoing feminist ethnographic and archival work.
Broadly, Niharika’s research engages with feminist and gender theory, feminist IR and critical militarisation studies, de/postcolonial sociological thinking on everyday politics, space, embodiment, affect, grounded political imaginaries, and uses creative methodologies like patchwork ethnography, ephemeral archives and narrative storytelling.
Examples of research funding:
Examples of Research Funding
Peace Research Grant, International Peace Research Association Foundation, 2019
LSE PhD Studentship, 2018
Felix Scholarship for MA Gender Studies at SOAS University of London, 2016
Niharika has also worked on a research project analysing the reportage on gendered violence in Indian newspapers, led by Dr Amanda Gilbertson, University of Melbourne and funded by the Melbourne Research Alliance to End Violence Against Women and their Children (MAEVe) fund, 2017.
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
Journal Articles
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 [forthcoming, 2024].
Book Chapters
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 [forthcoming].
Book Reviews
Cosmophilia: Reading Rahat Kurd as Kashmir Remains Under Lockdown, Association for Feminist Anthropology, August 2019.
Supervision
Niharika welcomes students researching coloniality and settler/colonialism; militarisation/military occupations; feminist politics, movements and theories; politics of memory and memorialisation, everyday politics and South Asia.
Public Engagement
Niharika is involved in feminist organising spaces in India and London and regularly writes on research, analysis and journalism platforms:
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.
