Spotlight on: Bulbul Prakash
We're delighted to introduce Bulbul Prakash (she/her) as part of our PhD/ECR Spotlight Series. Bulbul is a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Her research explores how Indigenous women in central India navigate and challenge systemic violence, including state militarisation, mining-led dispossession, and intersecting caste and gender inequalities through everyday practices of care, solidarity, and sustenance, drawing on feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial perspectives.
Find about more about Bulbul and connect via LinkedIn. You can also look at her Research Explorer page.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m a final-year PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Manchester. But if you had told my younger self that I would end up studying war, security, and politics, I would probably have laughed. I studied English literature as an undergraduate because politics frightened me. It felt like something that belonged to Presidents, treaties, and men in suits. Literature, on the other hand, was intimate. It lived in kitchens, in memories, in silences, in people.
Slowly I realised that politics lives there too.
That realisation took me from literature to an MA in Politics and International Relations, then an MPhil in Diplomacy and Disarmament, and eventually to my PhD. Today, I work with Gond Adivasi (Indigenous) women activists in Bastar, one of India's longest-running conflict regions. Through Photovoice, women photograph and narrate their everyday lives, and together we explore what it means to continue living amid militarisation, mining, displacement, and loss. My research asks a simple question: how do people keep life going when the world around them seems determined to make it impossible?
Alongside my research, I'm involved in the Politics Inclusive Classrooms Project at Manchester, which works to make teaching and learning more inclusive and encourages conversations around decolonising the curriculum and knowledge production.
Outside academia, I love photography, because it teaches me to slow down and pay attention. I enjoy long walks in nature, swimming, reading English and Malayalam literature, watching Malayalam films, listening to people tell stories, and dancing to Tamil songs whenever life feels a little too serious. If I weren't doing a PhD, I'd probably still be collecting stories.
What are your research interests?
Situated within applied feminist security studies, my research draws on feminist International Relations, Indigenous and decolonial feminisms, feminist political ecology, and critical engagements with the Women, Peace and Security agenda. I am particularly interested in how women in conflict-affected and Indigenous communities sustain life through care, collective action, and everyday relationships with land. Methodologically, my research centres participatory visual methods, collaborative knowledge production, and the ethics of conducting research in conflict settings. My current research contributes to decolonial feminist theorising by treating Indigenous women's concepts and epistemologies as sources of theory, rather than simply as evidence to be interpreted through existing frameworks.
Who is your favourite feminist icon?
My first feminist icon was my grandmother.
When I was growing up in Kerala, my grandmother told me stories every night about women who refused to fit the world they had been given. One of them was the Yakshi, a female figure from South Indian folklore who is often recast as a dangerous, seductive spirit. While many saw her as a monster, I couldn't understand why. She wandered alone at night, climbed trees, laughed loudly, spoke her mind, and answered to no one. As a child, she didn't frighten me; she fascinated me. I wondered why freedom had been turned into something monstrous.
Then there was Nangeli, who cut off her breast in protest against the caste-based breast tax, and Kuriyedathu Thatri, whose trial exposed the hypocrisy of caste and patriarchy. I didn't yet have the language of feminism, but these women stayed with me.
Academically, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been deeply influential. As a young graduate student, I often felt that knowledge only travelled in one direction - from the West to everywhere else. Reading Spivak made me realise that our own histories, languages and experiences could also be sites of theory rather than simply objects of study.
What are three sources you would recommend to others interested in feminist IR or your research topic?
Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary
This book completely changed how I think about violence. Das reminds us that violence doesn't simply happen and end; it seeps into everyday life, shaping relationships, memories, language and ordinary routines. It shifted my attention away from spectacular events and towards the quieter work of continuing to live.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
I read this while living in the UK, and parts of it felt painfully familiar. It made me think differently about language, belonging and what it means to inhabit multiple worlds at once. As someone working with Indigenous women whose experiences cannot always be translated into English, Anzaldúa gave me permission to take language seriously, not simply as a medium of communication, but as a home, a politics and a way of knowing.
When conversations about Women, Peace and Security focus primarily on international institutions, this collection reminds us that women across South Asia have long been building peace in ways that rarely make it into policy documents. It helped me think about feminist peacebuilding from within the region rather than through imported frameworks.
What's next for you?
The immediate goal is, of course, to finish my PhD.
After that, I'd like to curate a public Photovoice exhibition with the women who participated in my research, ideally in collaboration with a museum or cultural institution in the UK. Too often, research on conflict circulates only within universities. I'd like the photographs and stories created by the women themselves to reach wider audiences and their struggle for jal, jungle, jameen (land, forest, water) to be heard globally.
I'm also working towards developing practical guidance on the ethics of participatory fieldwork in conflict settings, drawing on experiences that are rarely written about in methods textbooks.
In the longer term, I hope to continue researching how communities sustain life under conditions of uncertainty. One ambition that has stayed with me is to establish an organisation supporting women and children affected by conflict in central India, creating a space where research, advocacy and community engagement can inform one another.