Ayesha Pattnaik

Ayesha Pattnaik is a DPhil candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, supervised by Professor Fernanda Pirie. Through a multi-sited ethnography following India's internal migrants, she researches how they navigate informality, experience law, and access citizenship.

Previously, Ayesha worked in the research wing of the NGO PRADAN , where she conducted academic and policy-oriented research on projects on migration, sustainable food systems, women’s collective action, and rural development in India. Before that, she worked on the interdisciplinary project TAPESTRY with Kyoto University and the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. For this project, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on India’s marginal environments with high climate change uncertainty.

Ayesha read an MSc. in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she was also a research assistant for the LSE South Asia Centre. She 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 writes for academic journals, blogs, and news platforms. A list of her publications is available here.