Akanksha Awal works on the anthropology of gender in contemporary India. Her research analyses political engagement over women’s social and sexual freedoms in Uttar Pradesh. Her DPhil research investigated how lower middle class women negotiated sexual freedoms in male-dominated college spaces in Ghaziabad. Her postdoctoral project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, will investigate how state institutions in Lucknow, particularly the police, respond to women’s demands for greater freedoms of intimacy, mobility and consumption.

Before joining Oxford, she worked as a journalist for the Financial Times where she covered large-scale protests against corruption from Delhi, which inspired her doctoral research.

Link to BIO