Ayesha Pattnaik

Ayesha Pattnaik is a DPhil candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, supervised by Professor Fernanda Pirie. Her doctoral research is based on a multi-sited ethnography following internal migrants in India who migrate to Kerala to work in the informal sector. She studies how migrants navigate legal frameworks and informality at their destinations to understand their experiences of migration and 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 has a background in Sociology and Anthropology. She completed an MSc. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA (Hons.) 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.