Sadaf Nausheen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. She completed her MA in women’s studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and BA in political science from the University of Delhi. Such training has given her an interdisciplinary background which is reflected in her doctoral work that sits at the intersection of gender studies and urban studies. As an ethnographic study, her research focuses on narratives of Muslim women in understanding gendered experience of urban public space.
Nausheen has presented her work at several national and international conferences. She has also co-authored and published in a peer-reviewed international journal and other online fora. Sadaf has been a co-recipient of the Centenary Decade Undergraduate Research Grant funded by Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Additionally, she undertook funded research as part of the Sponsored Studies Project by the Indian Association for Women’s Studies that allowed her to imbibe practices of reflexivity and empathy in doing qualitative work. Her doctoral research looks at the experiences of urban spaces by analysing the exclusions, claim making processes, and belongingness of Muslim women in Hyderabad, India. Focusing on how Muslim women navigate their access to public space in the city, the research attempts to mainstream marginalised voices in theorising women’s experiences. Furthermore, it takes into account the differences within the category of the ‘Muslim woman’ in order to bring out a heterogeneous understanding of the same.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, Sadaf is working on the methodological and analytical aspects of her Ph.D. project, while analysing the scope of intersectionality through various frameworks of study.