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Announcing the new Colonial Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group conveners

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The Colonial Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group (CPD) welcome new co-conveners, taking over from Jenna Marshall, Sharri Plonski and Heba Youssef. Find out more about the new conveners below. We would like to thank Jenna, Sharri and Heba for all the work they have done over the past few years. In particular their achievements include setting up the CPD Early-Career Paper Prize, getting the CPD blog off the ground, and a wide range of fantastic events.

The new CPD conveners are: 

Catherine Charrett 

Catherine Charrett is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, (she/they).  Catherine joined the University of Westminster in 2019, before that Catherine was a lecturer and researcher at Queen Mary University of London.  Catherine's research interests include anti-colonial and anti-imperial perspectives on sovereignty and diplomacy. Catherine's doctoral research, completed at Aberystwyth University (2010-2014) was on EU-Hamas diplomacy following the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Catherine has published this work with Routledge, Interventions Book Series and several leading journals. Catherine uses transdisciplinary and queer methods in her approach to research dissemination, which includes political drag performances. Catherine was an Early Career Research Fellow (2018-2019) with the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) for her public engagement approach to research. Catherine current research is on spatial modes of anti-imperial resistance from the prisoners' movements to urban design. Catherine has an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a BA in International Relations and Political Science from the University of British Columbia.  Alongside being co-convener for the BISA Colonial Postcolonial and Decolonial working group, Catherine is also chair of the ISA LGBTQA Caucus.   

Catherine's University of Westminster profile

Niharika Pandit

Niharika Pandit is a feminist academic researching gender, militarism/anti-militarism, post/coloniality, everyday politics and anticolonial feminisms. Insistently interdisciplinary and transnational, her work draws on and contributes to anticolonial feminist and queer epistemologies and epistemic possibilities of the Global South. She is Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. Currently, Niharika is working on her first book ‘Occupying the Everyday: Gender, militarism and anticolonial struggles of living in Kashmir’ based on her PhD thesis that won the 2023 BISA Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize. Her writings have appeared in Feminist Theory, The Contrapuntal, Catalyst, Kohl: A Journal of Body and Gender Research, The Polis Project, among others. She is an editor of Feminist Theory and Otherwise Magazine, and co-runs (with Akanksha Mehta) the feminist political educative collective Insurgent Knowledges. 

Niharika's Queen Mary University of London profile

Sarah Gharib Seif

Sarah Gharib Seif is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the (re)production and perpetuation of colonial, racialised and gendered constructions of ‘terrorism’ through media and government narratives in the United Kingdom. Her PhD project also seeks to interrogate the complicity between the media and government as political institutions within a colonial state. Sarah’s research interests include postcolonial, decolonial and feminist approaches to IR, critical approaches to terrorism, the politics and creation of narratives and discourses, and the intersections of gender, race, religion, and citizenship. She received her undergraduate degree in International Relations from St Andrews and holds an M.A. in International Peace and Security from King’s College London. She previously worked as a researcher on PRELT at CCCPA, with a focus on gender and terrorism, as well as a geopolitics and social media intelligence analyst.