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Sandhya is a social anthropologist who specializes in theoretical and empirical questions of law, structural inequality, truth and history. Her research explores the relationship between legal norms, personal memories of discrimination and violence, and social imaginaries of hope, justice and restitution. Located at the intersection of anthropology, and critical legal studies, her work analyses the potential of hate crime laws to address structural inequalities and respond to culturally and historically specific experiences of oppression and hate. 

Projects:

Sandhya's current research is unfolding along three lines. Her firt project explores conflicts over ‘hate speech’ in India, a country with a long history of communal violence. The project asks how the law can respond to hateful speech, and how legal approaches to injury relate to wider histories of discrimination and violence. Through ethnographic work with Indian courts, complainants and NGOs, the project analyses the relationship between legal notions of harm and wider landscapes of social memory among historically oppressed communities in India. The project focuses on the way temporal models and historical interpretations shape judicial arguments around harm and hateful intent. It asks if, and how, judges take into account the memories and histories of structural marginalization that complainants narrate when litigating harmful speech. Second, the project explores how judicial treatments of social history, affect how members of oppressed groups remember and narrate incidents of hate, and the social terrain within which they take place. Ultimately, her research asks what role hate speech legislation plays in combating, or reproducing, wider histories of discrimination and injury.

Sandhya's second project explores the social life of the only law in India, which bears the contours of a hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of) Atrocities Act. The results of this research are analyzed in Sandhya's forthcoming monograph entitled "Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India" which will appear in the South Asia in Motion Series at Stanford University Press in 2024 (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=36293). The book examines how Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) communities in the Indian state of Rajasthan mobilise the Prevention of Atrocities Act to navigate continuing concerns of social, political, and economic disadvantage and violent discrimination. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rajasthan and Delhi, the project put discussions about the personal and social effects of traumatic violence in conversation with debates about legal evidence, and considerations of law as an institutionalized horizon of possibility. It analyses what success means in the context of hate crime legislation and what possibilities and agencies such laws engender.

Finally, Sandhya is a Co-Investigator for the project "Pathways from Injury: Naming, Proving and Interpreting" at the University of Bern (PI: Professor Julia Eckert). The project is funded by the Swiss National Fund (SNF) and comparatively explores how different marginalized groups in India experienc the rule of law. For more information visit teh SNF website: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/207579 .

 

Background:

Sandhya completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in October 2020, where she was affiliated with the International Inequalities Institute (III).

Before coming the VU she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, at the University of Edinburgh. She also worked as a Lecturer and Research Associate for the Law and Anthropology Division at he University of Bern, Switzerland.

Sandhya holds an MPhil degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Colby College, Maine, USA.

Her research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Laura Bassi Foundation.

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