Madhulika Sonkar is an assistant professor of sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. She has a PhD in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her work engages the politics of schooling cultures, identity and aspirations in urban contexts, with a strong focus on Muslim women's educational journeys in contemporary India. Her PhD was based on the ethnographic study of a five-decade old Muslim girls’ school in Ballimaran, Old Delhi where she examined young women’s educational experiences in the complex mesh of class, beraderi, family, and neighbourhood. Since then her writing and teaching are located at the intersections of sociology of education, gender studies and feminist research praxis.
Additionally, she is interested in questions to do with educational policy, pedagogy, curriculum studies, higher education, and shifting meanings of skills and vocation in the Global South. Methodological interrogations on the challenges of conducting ethnography in diverse educational spaces remain pivotal to her training as a sociologist.
She was a visiting research fellow at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan under the ICSSR-JSPS Joint Seminar Programme in 2017. Madhulika has earlier taught sociology at Indraprastha College for Women and Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. She was a member of the Collaborative Writing Circle (May-June 2021) at Kohl Journal collaborating with scholars, artists, and activists from across the globe for its issue ‘A Revolutionary Archive’.
Currently she is an editorial member at the Feminist Review (Sage Journals).
Prior to joining academia, Madhulika was a news correspondent covering public health, gender and governance for Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) from 2010-2012.