Sarah Nandi

Doctoral Candidate
Political Science
McGill University

Sarah Nandi is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in the Department of Political Science with a focus in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research interests include knowledge production about sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in forced migration situations from ‘above’ and ‘below’.

Using feminist qualitative methods, she examines questions surrounding expertise-by-training versus expertise-by-experience in humanitarian encounters, the standardization of localized experiences into global data, and the reproduction of gendered and racialized international hierarchies in agenda setting.

Before coming to McGill, she read for an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at Worcester College, Oxford where she wrote her dissertation on the tensions between humanitarian development and localized Sahrawi feminist organizing. Prior to this, she was a Fulbright-Nehru research scholar in Kolkata, India focusing on the refusal of rehabilitation programs by transgender refugee survivors of sexual violence.

She is proficient in Bengali, Arabic, and French.