Niharika Pandit is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Society and Environment, Queen Mary University of London. She co-runs Insurgent Knowledges, an anticolonial feminist political education collective, and co-convenes BISA’s Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial working group. She is the author of Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford University Press 2026).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

My research is located in political sociology, gender and feminist studies, post/decolonial theory, and critical international relations. It is driven by a central intellectual commitment: to reconceptualise power, violence, and resistance by foregrounding liberatory thought from the margins of the Global South. I am interested in analysing contemporary formations of coloniality and carcerality as social processes of everyday life while insisting that marginalised communities are active producers of critical theory. My first book draws on and contributes to Critical Kashmir Studies, which has radically shifted how Kashmir needs to be understood as a context of military occupation and settler colonial governance, and beyond the nation-states of India and Pakistan and their assimilatory or nationalist narratives that erase Kashmiri demands for self-determination. Within gender and feminist studies, there are ongoing debates, especially post-2023 genocide in Gaza, about feminist complicity in settler, imperial, and fascist projects and how liberatory queer feminisms must consider questions of coloniality – whether of gender (binary), postcolonial nation-states, or settler entities. I am interested in these debates and engage with critical lines of thinking across disciplines to understand the logic and circulation of contemporary coloniality and people’s ongoing resistance to it.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

My work is contemporary in nature, and I am interested in understanding how peoples at the margins of political formations understand oppressive power and organise in resistance to it. Within gender and feminist thought, I have been inspired by black, third-world, and queer thinkers who refuse to untether questions of imperialism, class struggle, and anticolonialism from gender and sexual freedoms. The feminism I think of is liberatory: it is insistently anticolonial, antiracist, anti-caste, trans-inclusive, and anti-capitalist. Over the years, I have been asking broader questions about social and anticolonial liberation and have placed them at the centre of gender and feminist studies because there can be no feminism without anticolonialism, and no anticolonialism without feminism. I am also inspired by abolitionist thinkers because they insist that we think creatively and imaginatively beyond the conditions of life that are present and considered........

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