Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her

Division Social Sciences Division

Department/ College/ Unit Politics Department

Title Ph.D. Candidate in Politics

Affiliation Graduate

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation South Asia Studies

Web Site

Primary Office Location Merrill College Academic Building
139

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours By appointment

Mail Stop Merrill/Crown Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Shatakshi Singh is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation "Unmaking Citizenship: The Politics of Law and Claim-making Among Urban Poor in India" examines why fully enfranchised citizens are excluded from public goods and services that their legal status entitles them to, and how democratic states unmake the substance of citizenship even as they leave the formal status intact. It studies the claim-making practices of urban poor residents in India’s informal settlements as they contest forced evictions and assert socio-economic rights to show how legal and bureaucratic institutions, through quotidian technologies of governance, disaggregate urban poor Indians’ capacity to contest and claim citizenship entitlements in cities.

Her doctoral research has been supported by the P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship (2022–2023, 2023–2024), the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics (2024), the American Political Science Association’s Centennial Center Research Grant (2025), the Center for South Asian Studies Graduate Research Fellowship (2025), and most recently, the National Science Foundation Law and Science Dissertation Grant (2025) among others. 

Shatakshi holds an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies and an M.A. in International Relations and Area Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as well as a B.A. (Hons.) in History from the University of Delhi. Her M.Phil. thesis, Populism in Brazil under Bolsonaro (2016–2020), analyzed the articulation of populist discourse within racialized and gendered practices of state violence.

Summary of Expertise

• Citizenship
• Democratic Erosion
• Critical Urban Studies
• Urban Politics
• Legal Mobilization
• Populism
• South Asia

Research Interests

• State-Capacity
• Citizenship
• Exclusion
• Claim-Making
• Legal Mobilization
• Informality
• South Asia
• Latin America

Teaching Interests

• Comparitive Politics
• Contemporary Political Theory 
• Law and Society
• Theories of International Relations
• Urban Politics
• South Asian and Latin American Politics

Awards, Honors and Grants

External

2025 – National Science Foundation Law and Science Dissertation Grant (NSF #2416325) 
2025 – American Political Science Association Spring Research Grant 
2025 – SOAS "Authoritarianism, Law, and the Remaking of Society" Workshop Travel Grant 
2025 – International Studies Association Travel Grant 
2024 – Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics
2023–2024 – P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship 
2023 – Sciences Po-YSI Workshop "A Space for Place in the Social Sciences" Travel Grant (Declined) 
2022–2023 – P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship 

Internal

2026 – Chancellor's Quarterly Dissertation Year Fellowship, Division of Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz
2025 – Center for South Asian Studies Graduate Research Fellowship, Humanities Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz
2025 – Department of Politics Summer Research Grant, University of California, Santa Cruz
2024 – Department of Politics Summer Research Grant, University of California, Santa Cruz
2023 – Graduate Dean's Research Travel Grant, University of California, Santa Cruz (Winter 2023)
2023 – Graduate Dean's Research Travel Grant, University of California, Santa Cruz (Summer 2023)
2021 – Regents Fellowship Award, University of California, Santa Cruz