Dr. Rimple Mehta is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Communities and Regional Lead, South Asia in the School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University. At the University, she is one of the Global Challenge Leads for Building Fairer Societies. She has previously worked at the School of Social Work, Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research and field engagements broadly focus on women in prison, refugee women, and human trafficking. She engages with questions of gender, (im)mobilities, punishment and borders. Situating her research within the sub-field of border criminology, she adopts an intersectional feminist perspective with a strong emphasis on questions of epistemology, therefore viewing ‘reality’ from intersecting positions of marginality.

She has worked with women in prisons and detention in India, Australia and the Netherlands. She has written extensively about her work in books and several international journals. Her paper titled "So Many Ways to Love You/Self: Negotiating Love in a Prison" won the 2013 Enloe Award and was published in the International Journal of Feminist Politics. Her monograph titled "Women, Mobility and Incarceration: Love and Recasting of Self across the Bangladesh-India Border" was published by Routledge in 2018. Her latest co-edited volumes include “Women, Incarcerated: Narratives from India” (Orient BlackSwan 2022) and "Handbook on Border Criminology" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024). She is also the co-author of “Re-imagining Social Work: Towards Creative Practice” (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Prior to joining academia, she worked with organisations such as Swayam and networks such as Maitree against violence on women in West Bengal.