Ayesha Pattnaik

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.