Akanksha Mehta is a queer feminist educator, researcher, writer, photographer, and community organiser based in Southeast London and India. She is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Gender, Race and Cultural Studies and the Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her broader research uses narrative writing, ethnographic methods, visual practice, and feminist, queer, crip, postcolonial, and anti-caste theory to examine the gendered, sexed, and racialised workings of everyday political mobilisations, violence, settler colonialism, and nationalism. Her doctoral dissertation Right-Wing Sisterhood (SOAS, 2017), which examined the everyday and transnational mobilisations and violence of women in the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the Israeli Zionist settler project in Palestine, won the 2018 Best Dissertation Award by the European International Studies Association. She is currently finishing a monograph that expands on the project and will be published by Oxford University Press.

Akanksha’s teaching, within and beyond the university, examines critical knowledge productions on race and racism, gender and sexuality, caste, and disability, and it centers grassroots organising, protest, and resistance, and radical crip and community-oriented pedagogies. She has won Student-Led Teaching Awards for ‘Challenging and Inspiring Teaching’ in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021, and has also written about pedagogy, care, institutional violence, higher education, research methods, and organising. She facilitates several community spaces of learning and education, including Insurgent Knowledges (co-plotted with Niharika Pandit), the Crip Theory Reading Group, a teach-out program on strike picket lines, and several other spaces of being together in joy, organising, politics, and education. She is a photographer and filmmaker, and in 2016 was awarded the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize in Visual Sociology by the International Sociological Association. She is a member of the Feminist Review Editorial Collective and was awarded the Community Engagement Award by the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association in 2020. She tweets at @ajeebaurat.