Dr Rishita Nandagiri is a Senior Lecturer in Global Health & Social Medicine whose work examines gender, reproduction, and global health through feminist and reproductive justice perspectives. Her research explores how reproductive lives are governed, contested, and shaped through everyday practices across diverse socio-political settings, with a particular focus on the Global South(s).

Rishita's work focuses on abortion, reproductive governance, and population politics, analysing how legal, policy, and medical frameworks shape reproductive experiences and inequalities. Working in collaboration and solidarity with feminist collectives and movements, and engaging closely with feminist scholarship, she examines how people navigate, resist, and rework systems of care, with particular attention to informal and transnational networks, self-managed abortion, and everyday practices of reproductive decision-making.

Before joining GHSM, she held postdoctoral and teaching positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), including an ESRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Methodology. Her work has involved collaboration with feminist collectives and advocacy organisations, particularly in India, producing research and community-facing resources on abortion and care-seeking.

Research 

• Abortion
• Reproduction and reproductive justice
• Gender and global health
• Reproductive governance and population politics
• Qualitative and feminist research methods

Rishita’s research investigates reproduction as a key site through which power, inequality, and governance are enacted and contested. Her work centres on abortion, reproductive governance, and population politics, with a particular focus on the Global South(s). Her research makes three core interventions: analysing the intersections of law, policy, and population frameworks in shaping reproductive inequalities; examining shifting infrastructures of abortion and care, including self-managed abortion, transnational networks, and the intersections of abortion politics and carcerality; and advancing feminist approaches to knowledge production through qualitative, participatory, and visual methods.

Across these areas, her work contributes to rethinking dominant frameworks in global health by foregrounding questions of governance, justice, and solidarity, and by engaging with the possibilities and limits of policy, activism, and lived experience in reproductive politics.

Teaching

Postgraduate

• 7SSHM616 Critical Bioethics
• 7SSHM503 Designing Qualitative Research for Social Science and Health

PhD supervision

Rishita welcomes PhD proposals engaging gender, reproduction, and global health through feminist and justice-oriented approaches. She is particularly interested in projects on abortion and reproductive politics, and in research that pushes methodological boundaries through qualitative, participatory, or creative designs.

Rishita currently supervises:

• Caitlin Gardiner (with Dr Michelle Pentecost)
• Kat Pineo (with Dr Mark Eccleston-Turner)

Further details

See Rishita's research profile