Ayesha Pattnaik

Ayesha Pattnaik is a DPhil candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professor Fernanda Pirie, is an ethnography following India's internal informal migrants in order to analyse how borders reframe migrants’ expectations of and access to law and citizenship.

Previously, Ayesha worked in the research wing of the NGO PRADAN where she conducted academic and policy-oriented research for multiple projects on themes including migration, sustainable food systems, women’s collective action, and rural development in India. Prior to that, as a research associate with Kyoto University and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS Sussex) on the interdisciplinary project TAPESTRY, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival research studying transformation among communities in India’s marginal environments with high climate change uncertainty.

Before working in the development sector, Ayesha read an MSc. in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and completed her undergraduate degree in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Political Science from Ashoka University.

She is currently an editor at Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies. She frequently writes for academic journals, blogs, and news platforms. A list of her publications is available here.