Sangita joined the team to the UKRI-funded JustGESI project (Mainstreaming Gender Equality and Social Inclusion for a Just Energy Transition in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania), led by Professor Vanesa Castán Broto.
She joined the Institute in May 2025, bringing her ethnographic and interdisciplinary expertise to this collaborative initiative focused on inclusive energy transitions. Her role involves supporting the integration of Institutional Ethnography as a methodological approach to study and address the structural drivers of discrimination and oppression that constrain the equitable delivery of energy transition policies in the project’s focus countries.
Sangita recently completed her PhD in Risk and Disaster Reduction at СŷÊÓƵ College London (UCL), having passed her viva with no corrections. Her doctoral research, grounded in feminist and decolonial perspectives, examines the political, epistemological, and ontological tensions surrounding the recognition and application of Indigenous knowledge in the global climate change and disaster risk reduction discourse. A central case study in her thesis further highlights the intergenerational riverine relationships of the Majhi Indigenous communities and their resistance to river diversion and hydropower-induced displacement in Nepal’s central hills. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including ethnography, oral histories, archival and policy analysis, and autoethnography, her research engages with Indigenous activists, environmentalists, engineers, policymakers, and development professionals to trace how knowledge, identity, and power intersect in environmental governance.