Ayesha Pattnaik
Biography
Ayesha Pattnaik is a DPhil candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, supervised by Professor Fernanda Pirie. Her doctoral research is a multi-sited ethnography of internal migration in India, based on fourteen months of fieldwork following workers between rural Odisha and urban Kerala. She studies how internal migrants navigate work, law, and everyday life in contexts where legal protections formally exist but remain difficult to access.
Over the course of the DPhil, she has received several competitive research and fieldwork awards, including the Socio-Legal Studies Association Fieldwork Grant, the St Antony’s College Travel and Research Grant, the Faculty of Law Bursary and Graduate Travel Grant. In 2025, she was selected to attend the fully funded Sociological Review Foundation Writing Retreat.
Previously, Ayesha worked in the research wing of the NGO PRADAN, where she conducted academic and policy-oriented research for 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 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.
Publications
Journal article
Armes S and others, ‘Addressing nutritional gaps and suggesting a practical framework to reduce the risk of malnutrition and improve nutrition security in santhal tribal communities in India’ (2023) 6(S1) BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health a3.1
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Pattnaik A, ‘Loyalty, Liberty, and the Law: Analysing the Juxtaposition of Nation and Citizen in the Indian Sedition Law’ (2022) 31(6) Social & Legal Studies 829
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Rao N and others, ‘Destinations Matter: Social Policy and Migrant Workers in the Times of Covid’ (2020) 32(5) The European Journal of Development Research 1639
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Pattnaik A, ‘Conservation Dilemmas in Contemporary India’ 4(1) Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal
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Internet publication or blog post
Pattnaik A, ‘Beyond Migrant Marginality in International Law’ (Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, 11 March 2026)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Moving Between Law: Lived Experiences of Informal Migrant Workers in India’ (Socio-Legal Studies Association, 15 May 2025)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Labouring under a misapprehension? : Why exploited Indian workers talk of freedom and aspirations’ (The Sociological Review Magazine, 6 February 2024)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Truth and Technicalities in Terror Trials’ (Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, 24 May 2023)
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Pattnaik A, ‘The Right to Roam: How India’s domestic migrants are penalised by citizenship laws’ (The Sociological Review Magazine, 6 December 2022)
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Bhanjdeo A and Pattnaik A, ‘Rediscovering Resilient and Sustainable Food Systems in India’s Santhal Parganas Region’ (Tata-Cornell Institute Blog, 3 March 2022)
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Pattnaik A and Patil I, ‘The Issue is Exploitation, not Migration’ (India Development Review, 18 May 2021)
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Pattnaik A, ‘When Will India’s Anganwadi Workers, ASHAs Get Financial Security?’ (The Quint, 17 February 2021)
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Pattnaik A, ‘The Fight at the Front: Securing Rights for India’s Rural Health ‘Volunteers’’ (The Diplomat, 12 February 2021)
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Rao N and others, ‘Hidden Hands of the City: How the Pandemic Unveiled the Systematic Neglect of Indian Migrant Workers’ (EADI Blog, 1 December 2020)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Long Read: The art of dissolving dissent: India’s sedition law as an instrument to regulate public opinion’ (South Asia @ LSE, 4 October 2019)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Towards transparency: How institutionalising social audits can increase efficiency of rural welfare programmes in India’ (South Asia @ LSE, 16 January 2019)
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Conference paper
Pattnaik A, ‘Loyalty, Liberty, and the Law: Analysing the Juxtaposition of Nation and Citizen in the Indian Sedition Law’ (Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference 2023)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Destinations Matter: Social Policy and Migrant Workers in the Times of COVID’ (Citizenship in Pandemic Times)
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Pattnaik A, ‘Finding Fields: Moving with Migrant Workers’ (Exploring Movement in (Ethnographic) Method: Space, Time, and Theory)
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Presentation
Pattnaik A, ‘Good Workers Find Good Employers’, Socio-Legal Studies Annual Conference, Labour Law and Society stream