Dr Philippa Williams

Profile

My research and teaching at Queen Mary intersect political, digital, economic and development geography, with a focus on everyday political and digital life in India and its transnational community. I am interested in questions concerning how the state is experienced, how citizenship is articulated and how marginality, particularly in the context of violence/nonviolence is lived. My latest research examines the geopolitics of digital privacy and WhatsApp in India. I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Geography (2019-2022).   

Current and previous research projects: 

• Privacy Techtonics: Digital geopolitics of privacy, WhatsApp and Democracy in India (Leverhulme, WhatsApp) 
• Surviving violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India (British Academy)
• Ordinary work and everyday life (British Academy) 
• Geographies of peace (ESRC) 
• Democracy, citizenship and the state - India and the UK (ESRC)

My forthcoming book Privacy Techtonics: Digital geopolitics of privacy, WhatsApp and Democracy in India (with Bristol University Press) examines the geopolitics of digital privacy, WhatsApp and everyday democracy in India (co-authored with Lipika Kamra):

Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India is published by the RGS-IBG Book Series and was awarded the 2016 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award by the Political Geography Speciality Group at the American Association of Geographers.

I have an edited books on Geographies of Peace with Nick Megoran and Fiona McConnell and Beyond the Wage: Ordinary work in diverse economies led by Will Monteith and with Olivia Vicol.

At Queen Mary I am a fellow of the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) and a member of the South Asia Forum, IHSS Digital Lives network, the City Centre and the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Production (CLASP). I was previously academic lead for the Resilient Futures India Initiative at Queen Mary’s Global Policy Institute and Secretary of the British Association for South Asian Studies Council. In the School of Geography I was Senior Tutor (2017-2020) and Director of Education (2022-2024 and returning July 2025).

Before joining Queen Mary in 2013 I was a Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge having completed an ESRC-funded PhD in Geography also at the University of Cambridge. 

If you’re interested in collaborating, please get in touch p.williams@qmul.ac.uk 

 

Teaching

I am a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and enjoy teaching across our BA/BSc Geography, MSc in Development and International Business and MA Global Development programmes.

Past and current modules at Queen Mary include: 

Undergraduate 

GEG4015 Sustainable Transitions 
GEG5155 Development Geographies* 
GEG5103 Geographical Research in Practice
GEG6129 Contemporary India: Politics, Society and the Economy  
GEG6007 Readings in Contemporary India
GEG6120 Development Futures: Mumbai Unbound 
Undergraduate Dissertation*

Postgraduate 

GEG7137 Retheorising Global Development*
GEG7131 Global Working Lives 
GEG7130 Democracy, Citizenship and Rights 
GEG7120 Geographical Thought and Practice 
Masters Dissertation* 

*Teaching in 2025-26 

Research

Research Interests:

Privacy Techtonics: Digital geopolitics of privacy, WhatsApp and Democracy in India

Credit: Tushar Mahajan (@route2tushar) at Unsplash

Privacy Techtonics is forthcoming (2026) with Bristol University Press (co-authored with Lipika Kamra). The global dominance of the Meta owned messaging app WhatsApp, and the recent ideological and policy shift by big tech towards digital private spaces raises important questions about the balance between public and private interests in a digital age. Privacy Techtonics examines how as an idea and a practice, digital privacy is infused with power relations, from intimate spaces of everyday life to the board rooms of big tech and the policies of state governments. 
Drawing on extensive research India, WhatsApp’s largest market, Privacy Techtonics shifts attention away from western experiences of digital technology and privacy, to centre the ‘digital peripheries’ and ordinary digital technologies. In this crucial context it asks who has a right to digital privacy, how is privacy constructed and regulated by different actors and stakeholders, and what are ordinary ‘citizens’’ expectations and experiences of digital privacy? It examines how and why digital privacy is designed through end-to-end encryption, the legal and regulatory landscapes produced through relationships between big tech and government, and the digital lives of ordinary people. The book concludes that whilst WhatsApp is intended to enhance democratic life, in its largest global market, it is also implicated in undermining everyday democracy. 

The research was funded by my Philip Leverhulme Trust Award with the initial phase supported by WhatsApp (with Lipika Kamra, University of Birmingham). Our research was the inspiration for Privacy Techtonics, an art exhibition co-produced with artist and curator Candice Jacobs, both online www.OTOKA.org and in situ at the Broadway Gallery, Nottingham exploring the relationship between digital technologies, privacy, power and politics. 
Earlier phases of the research were published in Antipode, Territory, Politics, Governance and Environment and Planning C: Politics and Society. 

Project website https://whatsapppolitics.com/  

Surviving violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India

Despite the passing of India’s Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2006), civil society organisations report ongoing societal and infrastructural challenges in reducing the gap between legal and policy provisions, and access to support, services, and justice for survivors of domestic violence. Where access to, and awareness of the law is uneven or lacking, our research with survivor-victims of domestic violence asked: what are the informal, non-legal and everyday practices that women engage in to cope, seek justice, and build resilience in the context of trauma?
This project was a collaboration between academics and civil society organisations in India and the UK and engaged feminist documentary photography in dialogue with survivors’ testimonies to capture, and make visible, the everyday and enduring nature of domestic violence. The research was funded by the British Academy-GCRF (co-PI) and has been published and publicised in regional and national media. 

Project website: https://www.survivingviolence.org/ 

Ordinary work and everyday life

This research contributed new, cross boundary perspectives on people’s relationships to work in India, and global South more broadly. I co-edited a volume on ‘Ordinary Work’ for Bristol University Press led by Will Monteith (QMUL) and with Olivia Vicol (QMUL) that brings together a collection of ethnographic examinations of ‘work’ to disrupt conventional (northern) conceptualisations of waged work. In collaboration with Al James (Newcastle University), Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge) and Fiona McConnell (University of Oxford) I have examined questions of worker agency, skills upgrading and socially inclusive growth against the backdrop of India’s economic growth. Our paper on ‘Muslim middle class professionals’ won the Ashby Prize for most innovative paper in Environment and Planning (A) 2017 and used a novel hybrid geographical approach to centre marginalised professionals in the global South.

Geographies of peace

This research challenges the dominance of scholarship within geography and the social sciences that privileges attention on practices of violence at the risk of occluding spaces of peace and nonviolence. My research has been developed in collaboration with Nick Megoran (Newcastle University) and Fiona McConnell (University of Oxford) in Geographies of Peace as well as through my PhD and postdoctoral fieldwork in Varanasi, north India. 
My monograph, Everyday Peace? Politics, citizenship and Muslim lives in India was published in 2015 by the RGS-IBG Book Series and was awarded the Julian Minghi Prize, American Association of Geographers, Political Geography Group. Everyday Peace examines how the city produces and is produced through sites and networks of everyday living and working together across difference. It rethinks ideas about citizenship and Muslim identity in urban India and intervenes in dominant thinking about relations between India’s Hindus and Muslims as intractably violent. Instead, it reveals how diverse processes such as cooperation, indifference and friendship more often constitute an everyday urban ‘peace’. A chapter on ‘Peace’ (co-authored with Fabien Cante) is forthcoming in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography. Second Edition. 

Democracy, citizenship and the state - India and the UK 

Underpinning much of my research is a concern with examining experiences of the state, and the intersections between democracy, secularism and citizenship within India and India’s transnational community. It has illuminated the disjunctures between democracy in practice and reality, and the importance of exploring situated experiences of injustice, marginality and subaltern agency. In the UK I have researched the material and lived politics of Indian transnational lives as they encounter the Indian emigration state and the UK’s hostile immigration environment. 

Publications

BOOKS 

Williams, P and L. Kamra (2026) Privacy Techtonics: Digital geopolitics of privacy, WhatsApp and Democracy in India. Bristol, Bristol University Press.

Williams, P. (2015) Everyday Peace? Politics, citizenship and Muslim lives in India. Oxford, Wiley Blackwell RGS-IBG Book Series. 

EDITED BOOKS

Monteith, W., O. Vicol and P. Williams (2021) Ordinary work: Ethnographies of life beyond wage labour. Bristol, Bristol University Press

McConnell, F., N. Megoran and P. Williams (2014) Geographies of Peace. Eds. London, I. B. Tauris. 

JOURNAL ARTICLES 

Oza, E., Williams, P., & Kamra, L. (2024). Digital denizenship: Hindu nationalist architectures of digital closings and unbelonging in India. Environment and Planning C, 42(7), 1150-1169. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241226813

Kumar, L, P. Williams and P. Johar (2023) Grassroots Authoritarianism: WhatsApp, middle class boundary making and pandemic governance in New Delhi’s neighbourhoods. Territory, Politics, Governance. 11(6): 1121-1140 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2022.2160372

Williams, P and Lipika Kamra with P. Johar, M. Kumar, F. Khan and E Oza (2022) No room for dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces and Lived Democracy in India Antipode 54(1): 305-33 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12779

Williams, P (2019) Emigration State Encounters: The everyday material politics of a diaspora technology Political Geography 68: 1-11 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.10.005

Featherstone, D., Björkdahl, A., Chatterjee, I., Jazeel, T., & Williams, P. (2018). Review Symposium for Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim lives in India, Philippa Williams, Wiley Blackwell (2015), RGS-IBG Book Series. Political Geography. 164-170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.06.001

Williams, P., A. James, F. McConnell and B Vira (2017) Working at the margins? Muslim middleclass professionals in India and the limits of ‘labour agency.’ Environment and Planning (A) 49(6): 1266-1285. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17692324 *Awarded the Ashby Prize for most innovative paper in the journal 2017

Williams, P.  (2013) Reproducing everyday peace in north India: process, politics and power Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(1): 230–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.652878

Williams, P. (2012) India’s Muslims, lived secularism and practicing citizenship. Citizenship Studies 16(8): 979–995. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.735023

Williams, P. (2011) An absent presence: experiences of the ‘welfare state’ in an Indian Muslim mohalla. Contemporary South Asia. 19(3): 263–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2011.594157

Chopra, D., Williams, P., & Vira, B. (2011). Politics of citizenship: experiencing state–society relations from the margins. Contemporary South Asia, 19(3), 243–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2011.596275

Williams, P. and F McConnell (2011) Critical geographies of peace. Antipode. 34(4): 927–931. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00913.x

Williams, P., B. Vira and D. Chopra. (2011) Marginality, agency and power: experiencing the state in contemporary India Pacific Affairs 84 (1): 7–23. https://doi.org/10.5509/20118417 

Williams, P. (2007) Hindu Muslim Brotherhood: Exploring the Dynamics of Communal Relations in Varanasi, North India Journal of South Asian Development 2(2): 153–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/097317410700200201 

REPORTS 

Williams, P., C. Jacobs and L. Kamra (2022) Privacy Techtonics Exhibition Reader Queen Mary University of London and OTOKA. Available here

P. Williams and Shazia Choudhry with Supurna Banerjee, Preeti Karmarkar, Nandini Ghosh, Girija Godbole, Ruchira Goswami, Kolika Mitra and Swarna Rajagopalan (2023) Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India. Queen Mary University of London. Available here 

CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES

Cante, F. and P. Williams (2025) Peace In Mamadouh, V., N. Koch, C.Y.  Woon and J. Agnew (eds) (2025) The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography. Second Edition, Hoboken, NJ, USA/Bognor Regis, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Hardback ISBN: 9781119753971 

Williams, P (2021) Making the ‘smart heritage city’: Banal Hinduism, beautification and belonging in ‘new India’ Editor István Keul Spaces of religion in urban South Asia. Routledge. 

Williams, P. (2017) Moral Geography for International Encyclopaedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Wiley-AAG 1-8

Megoran, N. F. McConnell and P. Williams (2016) Dimensions of Peace: Disciplinary and Regional Approaches. In Dimensions of Peace: Disciplinary and Regional Approaches Richmond, O., S. Pogodda and J. Ramovic. Palgrave Macmillan. 123-138.

Williams, P., N. Megoran and F. McConnell (2014) Introduction: Geographical Approaches to Peace In Geographies of Peace. McConnell, F., N. Megoran and P. Williams, eds. London, I. B. Tauris.  1-28

Williams, P (2014). Everyday Peace, agency and legitimacy in north India In Geographies of Peace. McConnell, F., N. Megoran and P. Williams, eds. London, I. B. Tauris. 194-211

Williams, P. and F. McConnell (2014) Geographies of Peace, Geographies for Peace In Geographies of Peace. McConnell, F., N. Megoran and P. Williams, eds. London, I. B. Tauris.  194-211

Williams, P (2014) Working narratives of inter-community harmony in Varanasi’s silk sari industry In Failed development and identity politics: India through the lens of Uttar Pradesh Jeffery, R. C. Jeffrey and J. Lerche. London, New Delhi: Sage. 250-260

Williams, P. (2011) Hindu-Muslim Relations and the ‘War on Terror’ In The Companion to an Anthropology of India. I. Clarks- Deces, ed., 241–259. Oxford:

Media 

Williams, P Interview for BBC World Service ‘Tech Tent’ in ‘WhatsApp: We speak to boss Will Cathcart’ 13 March 2023

Williams, P, S. Rajagopalan, G. Godbole and R. Goswami. Still a nightmare for domestic violence survivors. The Hindu (Indian broadsheet) 29 November 2022

Williams, P and L. Kamra (2021) WhatsApp’s controversial privacy update may be banned in the EU – but the app’s sights are fixed on India. The Conversation 13 May 2021

Kamra, L and P. Williams (2019) Strategies to tackle extreme speech on WhatsApp must bring together socio-political, digital worlds, Scroll 11 May 2019

Williams, P and L. Kamra (2019) India’s WhatsApp election: political parties risk undermining democracy with technology, The Conversation 28 February 2019 

Supervision

Current PhD Students

Shruti Arora (with Sydney Calkin) PhD-QMUL Abortion and Reproductive Politics and Digital Health Technologies in India. QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award

Natasha Sharma (with Will Monteith) PhD – QMUL: ‘I May Scavenge Through Dirt, But I Don’t Do Dirty Work’! The Work-Lives of Kolkata’s Manual Scavenging Communities (2019-) QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award

Completed

Sofia Negri (with Sam Halvorsen) PhD-QMUL: Working and organising flexibly through digital-urban spaces: the spatial and political composition of delivery platform workers in Argentina (2020-24) QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award 

Ekta Oza (with Catherine Nash) PhD - QMUL: Childhoods under Military Occupation: everyday experiences, resistance and citizenship for children and young people in Kashmir QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award (2020-24)

Kavita Dattani (with Kavita Datta) PhD – QMUL: A Suitable Swipe: Leisure, Pleasure and Dating Apps in Mumbai. ESRC LISS DTP 1+3. (2018-22). Kavita is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, USA following a postdoc at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Faith Taylor (with Catherine Nash) PhD-QMUL: Love in the Time of Precarity: Reproduction and Intimacy Among Millennials in Hackney (2016-19) QMUL Arts and Humanities Studentship

Eimear Kelly (with Catherine Nash) PhD-QMUL: Alternative forms of Irish dance (2015-2019) ESRC 1+3 Studentship

Aditya Ray (with Al James). PhD – QMUL: Work in India's New Service Economy: Employee experiences in the domestic voice‐based consumer‐interaction industry in Pune QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award (2014–18). Aditya is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at UWE Bristol, UK following an

ESRC postdoc at the Open University. 

Future Students

I would be excited to hear from students interested in the following areas, preferably in, but not limited to, India/South Asia:

• Digital politics/geopolitics and the politics/geopolitics of digital technologies 
• Citizenship
• The everyday state/experiences of the state
• Political economy of violence and non-violence  
• Geographies of peace

Public Engagement

I collaborate with civil society organisations, artists and photographers and engage with a variety of audiences through seminars, art exhibitions, blogs, training workshops and materials, animations, reports, policy briefs, podcasts and interviews. Our research has been published and publicised in the UK and Indian media and broadcast on the BBC World Service. For further information see project websites: 

https://www.survivingviolence.org/ 
https://whatsapppolitics.com/ 
www.OTOKA.org  [Privacy Techtonics #Episode 1] 

Recent Seminars and Presentations

• March 2021 WhatsApp and surveillance: Grassroots Authoritarianism and neightbourhood politics. London International Development Centre Seminar series, UK. (with Lipika Kamra) 
• March 2021 No room for dissent: WhatsApp's 'digital living room', kinship and lived democracy in India.  Science and Technology Studies Seminar Series, UCL, London
• September 2020 Grassroots authoritarianism: Resident welfare associations and physical-digital boundaries in New Delhi Borders, bordering and sovereignty in digital space. Symposium at the LSE (with Lipika Kamra)
• September 2019 The WhatsApp group and digital-analogue politics in urban north India Morgenstierne Seminar, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Language, University of Oslo, Norway
• July 2019 Peace Geographies, a view towards the future. Roundtable Advancing peace geographies: Transformations, collaborations and new directions. Coventry University, UK
• June 2019 The WhatsApp group, digital-analogue politics and the city in India, Plenary for Cities, Infrastructure and the 'digital turn' in the Postcolony' hosted at King's College London
• June 2019 The WhatsApp group, ‘digital living rooms’ and everyday political life in urban India Workshop on Digital politics and the politics of the digital, Queen Mary University of London, UK.
• June 2019 Digital technology and democracy, Public talk for Brave new digital worlds: the influence of technology on democracy. Tata Consultancy Services Spark Salon in partnership with Nesta, London.
• March 2019 Party politics, digital mediations and the analogue city, Workshop on Political Parties and Democracy in the City' Queen Mary University of London, UK.
• August 2018 State-led digital financial futures: Transforming India’s relationship to cash, financial inclusion and development. With Kavita Datta. 2018 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK, Cardiff.
• June 2018 From demonetisation to digital financial inclusion: Transforming a nation’s relationship to cash. With Kavita Datta. Centre for International Development, Northumbria University Newcastle.

• March 2017 States of ambiguity: the material and emotional politics of an emigrant state strategy. University College London. Human geography seminar series.
• February 2017 ‘The politics of lived secularism and peace cultures in north India' University of Nottingham. Historical and Cultural Seminar Series.
• November 2016 ‘Hindu-Muslim relations, the silk industry and everyday peace in north India’. Grinnell College, Iowa, USA. Public lecture.
• August 2016 Author meets critics session at the RGS-IBG International Annual Conference 2016with Tariq Jazeel, Katherine Brickle and Claire Dwyer on my book Everyday Peace? Politics, citizenship and Muslim lives in India. 2016 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK.
• August 2016 Aspirational infrastructures: Making elite private housing in India. With Romola Sanyal. 2016 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK.
• August 2016 ‘Digital Labour’ at the margins?  Muslim professional (im)mobilities in India’s New Service Economy.  With Al James and Bhaskar Vira.  2016 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK.
• March 2016 Working at the Margins: Muslim middle class professionals in India's New Service Economy. Philippa Williams, with Al James and Bhaskar Vira. Centre for the Study of Social Sciences (ICAS workshop), Calcutta, India
• August 2014. Peace, Geography and the political With Fiona McConnell. 2014 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK.
• August 2014. Negotiating the lived politics of UK and Indian citizenship. Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK.
• July 2014 ‘Lived politics of overseas Indian ‘citizenship’. ECSAS Annual Conference, Zurich, Switzerland.
• March 2014 Muslim graduates in India’s new economy’. BASAS Annual Conference, Royal Holloway ‘
• March 2013 Guest Lecture on MA in Political Geography. ‘Geography and the politics of peace’. University of Zurich.
• April 2013. ‘Justice and the politics of development in India’. BASAS Annual Conference, SOAS
• March 2012 ‘The politics of peace in north India’. Martin Society Dinner, St John’s College, University of Oxford.
• February 2013 ‘Marginality, citizenship and justice’. American Association of Geographers, New York.
• February 2012 ‘Marginality, citizenship and justice in north India’. South Asian Studies Council, Brown Paper Bag Series. Yale University, USA.
• September 2011 ‘Countering Terror: vernacularising peace in north India’. Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Annual Conference, London, UK.
• November 2011 ‘Critiques and narratives of peace’. Roundtable discussion. Newcastle University, UK.
• January 2011 Reproducing everyday peace in north India: process, politics and power’. ODID Contemporary South Asia Seminar Series, QEH, University of Oxford