What is Knowledge for? Insurgent Knowledges and Pedagogical Practices of Freedom

In this interactive session, Niharika Pandit and Akanksha Mehta will elaborate on Insurgent Knowledges - a feminist anti-colonial public education collective co-plotted by them in 2023 - and discuss the possibilities and practices of freedom, liberation, community, and struggle in times of planetary crises. Drawing on their political and pedagogical work beyond the university, they will explore collective knowledge production and feminist co-learn as a praxis of realising and imagining radical futures.

Niharika Pandit is a feminist political sociologist researching gender, anti/militarism, coloniality, everyday politics and anticolonial feminisms. She is Lecturer in Sociology at Queen Mary University of London. Her research, writing and teaching draw on transnational, anticolonial and liberatory feminist and queer thinking, and she experiments with creative methodologies like patchwork ethnography, ephemeral archives and narrative storytelling. She is an editor of Otherwise Magazine and co-convenes BISA’s Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group.

Akanksha Mehta is queer feminist educator, researcher, writer, community organiser, and photographer based in SE London and India. She is Senior Lecturer in Gender, Race and Cultural Studies and co-Director of Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths. She runs Solidarity Kitchen, Crip Theory Reading Group, and is a trade union organiser and member of the Pune Queer Collective. Her research, writing, and teaching examine violence, resistance, and everyday politics, from a transnational feminist, queer, crip, critical race, anti-caste, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist thinking and praxis and she experiments with visual methodologies and narrative writing.