ApeCS Team

Dr. Pascale Schild is a social anthropologist interested in political anthropology, feminist theory, and critical peace and conflict studies. Her regional focus is on Jammu and Kashmir and the transnational Kashmiri freedom struggle.

Pascale is Senior Researcher and SNSF Ambizione Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, where she leads the research project ‘Affective Solidarities: Transnational struggles and the making of sovereign futures from occupied territories’. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from LMU Munich. Before joining the Institute in Bern, she was a visiting researcher at the South Asia Institute at SOAS, University of London (2020-2023), and at swisspeace, University of Basel (2024-2025). She held teaching positions at the University of Bern, LMU Munich, and the University of Basel. Her work has appeared in Citizenship Studies, Anthropology and Humanism, and Contemporary South Asia, among other journals and edited volumes. She is co-editor of the special issue ‘In/Civility in Peace and Conflict’ in Peacebuilding.

Dr. Vidushi Kaushik is a Research Fellow with the DCU Conflict Institute at Dublin City University, where she also completed her PhD in Politics and International Relations. Her work sits at the intersection of Adivasi/Indigenous politics, militarisation, extractivism, and the anthropology of security. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study of the (un)intended consequences of India’s surrender-and-rehabilitation policy in the Maoist conflict in Chhattisgarh, for which she was awarded funding as a Marie Curie ETN Fellow under the project ‘Global India’.
Vidushi moves between academia and humanitarian practice, with a long-standing focus on civilian and child protection. Before her doctoral work, she worked in the Mindanao islands of the Philippines alongside communities and both state and non-state armed actors on preventive strategies to minimise the impact of armed violence, including the formation of safe zones and the monitoring of human rights and ceasefire violations. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies and a Master’s in Disaster Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
More recently, she has brought her qualitative research skills to monitoring and evaluation work within India’s child protection ecosystem, and has supported grassroots organisations in Northeast India on grant writing for research on gender, health, and conflict.