Radhika Govinda

Radhika (she/her) is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and a former Director of GENDER.ED (2023-2025), the University's interdisciplinary hub for gender and sexualities studies. Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, she held a Lectureship in Gender Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. At Edinburgh, she is the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for her School, and an active member of the Centre for South Asian Studies. She is also a member of EREN and the Staff BAME network. She was Sociology Postgraduate Advisor (On-Programme) 2016-2017 and 2018-2020. In 2022-23, Radhika was the winner of the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Staff Recognition Award for Advancing Inclusion. In 2019-20, she was nominated from the School of Social and Political Science in the CAHSS Staff Recognition Awards in two categories: Inspiring Colleague, and Leader of Innovation and Change. Radhika is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Since 2021, Radhika is a member of the Board of Trustees for Shakti Women's Aid. Radhika's research bridges the fields of sociology of gender, international development and South Asian studies. Radhika's work sheds light on the importance of understanding gender politics at the intersections of caste, class, race/ethnicity and religion in women’s and social movements, in development policies and practice, in everyday social relations in rural and urban spaces, and in the global dynamics of knowledge production. The three broad foci of Radhika's current research are: (A) women’s agency and activism, (B) gender politics, development and urban social change, and (C) intersectionality and decentring northern hegemony in knowledge production.

Key research interests include:

• women's and social movements
• gender politics of development
• identity politics and intersectionality
• feminist, decolonial and critical pedagogies
• masculinities and the postcolonial state
• study of South Asian societies

Key research projects/ publications include:

Radhika was Primary Investigator on an international project, Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives: Questions of Identity, Pedagogy and Violence in India and the UK (2017-2021), which was funded by the UK-India Educational Research Initiative of the British Council. This was a North-South collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, UK and Ambedkar University Delhi, India. It explored successes, challenges, continuities and disjunctures that feminists encounter in the academy. Radhika was Co-investigator on a knowledge exchange initiative, Education for climate justice: Centring social justice amidst demands to prioritise the climate crisis in education (2020-21), led by Callum McGregor (University of Edinburgh) which was funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute. This was a collaboration involving colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, University of St Andrews, Glasgow Caledonian University, SCORE Scotland and Learning for Sustainability, Scotland.

• R. Govinda (2022) ‘Interrogating Intersectionality and the Politics of Feminist Knowledge Production’, Journal of International Women’s Studies (sp. issue guest edited by V. Dutoya, E. Bouilly and M. Saiget, 23 (2), Art. 6.
• R. Govinda, F. Mackay, K. Menon and R. Sen (eds.) (2021/22) Doing Feminisms in the Academy: Identity, Institutional Pedagogy and Critical Classrooms in India and the UK, New Delhi and Chicago: Zubaan and The University of Chicago Press.
• K. Choudhary, C. Wayland and R. Govinda (eds.) (2020) Feminist Struggles in the Academy in India and the UK. Comic book publication inspired by UGC-UKIERI funded Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives Project (2017-2021) workshops, roundtables and panel discussions, with illustrations by S. Khan and S. Singh.