Teaching Forum: Who and what is the University For? Building pedagogies of hope and struggle

Dr Akanksha Mehta is a queer feminist educator, researcher, writer, community organiser, trade unionist and photographer. She works as Senior Lecturer in Gender, Race and Cultural Studies and the Co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London.

With her comrades, she co-runs the anti-colonial feminist public education collective Insurgent Knowledges, the Crip Theory Reading Group, and the South East London based community space bringing together food and political education, Solidarity Kitchen. She is the Co-Equalities rep and a caseworker for the Goldsmiths UCU branch.

Akanksha's long-term research project, Rightwing Sisterhood, examines the everyday politics and mobilisations of Hindutva and Zionist women and her monograph from this research is going to be published with the OUP. Alongside her co-researchers, she is currently researching queer-trans collectivity, mobilisation and community building in India as well as co-editing a volume on queer hope and futures as understood, lived and imagined from the global south.

Akanksha was the recipient of the 2023 Emma Goldman Award, by the Flax Foundation, and has also won numerous awards for her teaching.