Faculty Coordinators
Anagha Tambe
Currently serving as the head of the
Savitribai Phule Women Studies Centre in Pune University, Anagha has been
closely connected with the Marx Phule Ambedkarite movement in Maharashtra. As a
Dalit feminist, she has seen and theorized about the intersectional effects of
caste and gender oppression in Indian society.
Annapurna Waughray, Manchester
Metropolitan University
Dr Waughray is arguably the foremost
scholar on caste and law in United Kingdom. Her focus is on legal regulation of
caste discrimination in the UK, India, the diaspora and in international human
rights law. She is a co-author of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission’s
Research Reports on Caste in Britain and is working on her next book,Capturing
Caste in Law: The Legal Regulation of Caste and Caste Discrimination."
Before moving into academia, she worked in public sector with migrant
populations, health and women’s rights and practiced as a Civil Litigator. More
onhttp://www.law.mmu.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/staff-profile/?var1=68
Meena Dhanda, Wolverhamton University,
United Kingdom
Prabha Kotiswaran, Kings College, London
I am a lawyer (once practitioner and now
academic) by training and an ethnographer at heart. My feminist acts of
micro-resistance through young adulthood found voice during my years as a law
student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore when an
immensely powerful (now unfashionably instrumentalist) vision that saw the
law as an instrument of social engineering resonated with me every single
moment on campus. It was as part of the NLS team in an extraordinary experiment
in legal education, the Community-based Law Reform Competition that I first
encountered the world of the lumpen proletariat, that of sex workers. Ever
since, I have learnt and written about women's reproductive labor as a
materialist feminist critical legal scholar with a fascination for
methodological experimentation and a commitment to redistributive justice, a
position that is almost always in tension with dominant iterations of feminist,
leftist and legal thinking. I embrace these several positions of marginality
within mainstream academic discourse with enthusiasm and a constant yearning
for praxis between the worlds of academia, activism and policy-making. My
academic profile is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/law/people/academic/pkotiswaran.aspx
Rahul Ramagundam, Jamila Milia Islamia,
Delhi
Sai Thakur, TISS rural campus at
Tuljapur
Herself an OBC feminist, Sai grew up in
Bombay in the 80s in a Socialist family. She found herself gravitating to
Bahujan identity and politics in her 20s and decided to pursue the intersection
of caste and gender in her PhD by studying the Agri women in the Konkan belt.
She lives in the serene campus of TISS in Tulajapur and teaches sociology,
research methods and one optional paper on social exclusion. See more athttp://campus.tiss.edu/tuljapur/faculty/sai
Saumya Uma, National Law School, Mumbai
Saumya started her journey
in lawyering for human rights at the NLS, Bangalore and has worked as a lawyer, law researcher, trainer, campaigner and activist on issues pertaining
to gender, law and human rights. She has been an international consultant for
the UNDP preparing a tool on witness protection with an integration of gender
concerns. She was the National Coordinator of ICC-India: an anti-impunity
campaign on mass crimes and international law – from 2002 to 2010. She is
actively associated with people’s movements for dignity and rights to
vulnerable and marginalized communities which is evident from her vast body of
action research, available at https://works.bepress.com/saumyauma/
Sawjanya Tamalapakula
Sumit Baudh
In-house
Team
Sameena Dalwai
‘Why are Indian toilettes dirty? Why is majority of
India still illiterate? Why Bollywood favours Muslim heroine and Hindu hero,
not vice versa?’ Sameena Dalwai thinks the answer to all these
questions point toward the politics of caste and gender and wishes to explain
why through this blog. Growing up on the stories of Marx, Phule, Ambedkar in a
socialist, Hindu- Muslim family in Mumbai, Sameena walked in workers
rallies as a child and turned out to be a radical feminist as a youth. Now she
finds it impossible to deal with patriarchy without the incumbent caste. She
writes on gender, identity, caste, class in English and Marathi. She teaches at
the Jindal Global University in Sonepat, Haryana.
Rhia B
Rhia is a twenty one year old law student who hasn't
let go of her teenage angst. She loves the Arctic Monkeys, pizza and crushing
the patriarchy. On the weekend you can find her at home watching makeup
tutorials, eating Mexican food and lecturing someone about social justice. She
used to spend all her time writing about the world on tumblr, and now she does
it here.
Sri Lalitha R
Lalitha is a BA LLB student of O.P Jindal University.
Growing up in an upper caste family in Hyderabad, she was always surrounded by
heteronormative notions of caste and gender. Being an inquisitive child, she
always questioned these but was never satisfied with the answers. This urge
inspired her to pursue law and more specifically gender studies. Even now, her
inquisitive personality has her changing people's mindsets by debating and
challenging their ideas. Some call her a radical feminist, but who knows? When
she isn't changing ideologies, she's cooking food for others and making their
lives a little brighter.
Student Editors
Anju Christine Lingham
Anju has a fascination for engaging with the written
word. She has therefore been drawn to work that allows her to indulge in it:
editing, writing, interpreting and reading. Studying political science at the
University of Hyderabad opened her eyes to the various ways in which power goes
hand in hand with language. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the law school
at King's College London, where her study on sexual violence and feminist
politics in India has increasingly come alive to the necessity of foregrounding
its relationship with caste.
Aarushi Mahajan
Aarushi is a fourth year law student from National Law
University Delhi. She is a passionate feminist who is keen to learn to
explore the intersectionalities that impact gender relations and vice versa.
She is a co-founder of the GenderCircle NLU Delhi and has been involved in
activities surrounding gender sensitisation and awareness. She believes that
writing is a powerful instrument that can promote discussion and allow for
exchange of ideas, something that is pertinent for our generation.
Kritika Chandrakant Vidyarthi
Having grown up in a rather pampered and ignorant
environment, Kritika feels her thoughts gained freedom after coming to a Law
School. Hearing about and dealing with real time, social issues she believes in
the power of information and the importance of awareness. She has a flair for
writing and has always taken to putting into words anything that she feels
strongly about.
Kavya Kartik
Kavya is an LLB student at Jindal Global Law School
with a physics degree from the United States. She wanted to be an astronaut but
life took her along the path of Marxist theory instead. She is committed to
caste abolition, LGBT rights activism, and the liberation of
women. Through this blog, she hopes to change the current discourse on
sexuality and gender relations. Kavya can speak English, Hindi, and Tamil
fluently, and her French is a work in progress. She also happens to love
kittens, chocolates, American TV shows, and Harry Potter.
Madhavi Achaiah
Madhavi is a third year law student at Jindal Global
Law School. She has always been keenly interested in writing about caste and
gender, particularly on issues related to politics and society. Her favourite
topics of discussion are reproductive rights and cultural relativism, both of
which she enjoys reading and writing about. By working on this blog, she wants
to encourage open discussion on sexual violence and caste politics in a safe
space.
Naveen Nagarjuna
The complexity and oddness of India's social
structures sometimes leaves me dumbfounded. The whole system is designed to
gratify ego, even those of the insignificant, like us.'These are words by Daya
Pawar, a writer from Maharashtra. Naveen engages in dialogues which examine and
re-think such egos and structures. Listening to voices ask questions which have
muted lives thrills him the most. Naveen focuses his reading and writing on
subjects of gender, sexuality, environment and law. He is current a student of
law at Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi.
Preeti Dash
A lawyer herself, Preeti has been amused
by the strange ways in which the legal fraternity works. And why not? What else
can be said about a community of professionals who fight for ‘equality’ before
courts, yet refuse to hire female lawyers for ‘fear of repercussions of sexual
harassment’ or when a judge who is supposed to be an ‘embodiment of justice’
refuses to sit on a chair occupied by a Dalit predecessor? Preeti finds some
answers in the fact that the legal community is after all, just an extension of
the society we live in, one that is ridden with gender and caste prejudices.
Preeti currently works as a Research
Associate in the Centre on the Death Penalty at National Law University, Delhi
and attempts to subvert patriarchy in each small and big step of her life.
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