Pratik Raghu is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Global Studies at UCSB. Pratik graduated summa cum laude from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, UT with a BA in Postcolonial Ethics and an Honors Degree. His broad intellectual interests include the converging crises of neoliberal capitalist modernity, particularly the resurgence of authoritarianism and proto-fascism; alternative globalization movements in the Global South, especially in South Asia and Latin America; and Indigenous, decolonial, Marxist, and anarchist theoretical and methodological frameworks. Pratik's dissertation analyzes Indigenous mobilizations against neoliberal dispossession and state violence in Jharkhand, India, and Oaxaca, Mexico, with the aim of theorizing how Indigenous communities in both states have articulated new political potentialities while navigating between their aspirations for autonomy and their entanglement in statist mechanisms of control. Pratik's work has been supported by grants and stipends from the Graduate Division, Graduate Student Association, Academic Senate, Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and Global Studies Department at UCSB. He has presented his work at numerous academic conferences and activist convergences, including keynote addresses at the 2017 and 2018 Global Crises and Global Change Undergraduate Conferences at Westminster College, paper presentations at the 2017 and 2018 Global Studies Association--North America Annual Conferences and the 2021 Global Studies Research Network's Annual Conference, and panel discussions at the 2017 Students for a Democratic Society National Convention, the 2018 and 2019 Left Forums in New York, and the 2019 Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues Summer School in Barcelona, Spain. In his time at UCSB, Pratik has also had the opportunity to teach in the critical, interdisciplinary fields of Global Studies, Asian American Studies, Feminist Studies, Black Studies, and History.

As an aspiring scholar-activist eager to bridge the town-gown divide, Pratik has worked as an organizer with several campus and community groups, including the Bonfire Media Collective, Food Not Bombs - Isla Vista, UCSB Cops Off Campus, UCSB 4 COLA, the Santa Barbara Student Activist Network, and the Society for Global Scholars (SGS), co-faciliating numerous actions, community gatherings, and consciousness-raising campaigns as well the 2018 SGS Annual Conference. In addition to publishing scholarly articles in Perspectives for Global Development and Technology, Pratik has also written critical commentaries on Indian and global politics for ROAR Magazine, Society & Space, CounterPunch, and It's Going Down. The generous travel grants he received from the Global Latinidades Project allowed him to travel to the 2019 REX CONCLiVE--a major civil society gathering held in Uttar Pradesh, India--as well as to complete his dissertation fieldwork with the Universidad de la Tierra ("University of the Earth" or Unitierra) in Oaxaca in the summer of 2021, the latter of which involved seven interviews and three participant-observation sessions with local Indigenous activists.