3/19/08

Ratna Kapur

Ratna Kapur is the Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi, and on the Faculty of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She is also a part of the Global Law Faculty at NYU School of Law. She is currently on mission as the Senior Gender Advisor for the United Nations Mission in Nepal, during the period of the constitutent assembly elections. She has written and published extensively on law from a postcolonial, feminist legal theory perspective. She has focussed specifically on international and human rights laws. She has held chairs and been a fellow at a large number of law schools around the world, including Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Centre, Dalhousie Law School, Zurich University, National Law School of India University, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She teaches courses on feminist legal theory, constitutional law, international law, and human rights law.

Kapur is the author of several books, including Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics fo Postcolonialism (Cavendish, 2005), Secularism's Last Sigh? Hindutva and the (Mis) Rule of Law, (co-authored) (Oxford University Press, reprint, 2001), Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (Sage, 1999). Her latest book Alien Insurrections: Gender, Migration and Law is forthcoming from Routledge in 2008.

She has contributed articles to several edited collections and also published extensively in law school journals. Her most recent articles include "Human Rights Impact of Anti-Trafficking Laws: A Case Study of India", in Collateral Damage, (Global Alliance Against the Trafficking of Women: Bangkok, 2007);"Migrant Women and the Legal Politics of Anti-Trafficking Interventions" in Human Trafficking Chapter 5 (Edward Newman and Jyoti Sanghera, eds., United Nations University, forthcoming, 2007); "Challenging the liberal subject: Law and Gender Justice in South Asia " in Gender Citizenship and Development 116-170 (Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, ed., IDRC and Zubaan: New Delhi, 2007); "Faith and the Good Liberal: Construction of Female Subjectivity in Anti-Trafficking Discourse" in Sexuality and the Law: Feminist Engagements (Vanessa Munro and Carl Stychin, eds, Cavendish:London, 2007);"The Prurient Postcolonial: The Legal Regulation of Sexual Speech in India in The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India (Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya, eds., Seagaull: New York, 2006);"Speaking from the Margins: The Legal Regulation of Sexuality in Postcolonial India, in Gender Justice in India : A Reader (in Karen Gabriel, ed., Katha: Delhi, 2005); Revisioning the Role of Law in Women's Human Rights Struggles in The Legalisation of Human Rights, (S. Mekled-Garcia, ed., Routledge: London, 2005);"Citizen and the Migrant: Postcolonial Anxieties, Law and the Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion" Theoretical Inquiries (Tel Aviv University) (2007); "Normalizing Violence: Transnational Justice and the Gujarat Riots" 15:3 Columbia Journal of Gender and Human Rights 885-927 (2006); "Dark Times for Liberal Intellectual Thought", 11 Professions Modern Language Association Journal, 22-32 (2006); "Human Rights in the 21st Century: Taking a Walk on the Dark Side", 28:4 Sydney Law Review 665-687 (2006); "Travel Plans: Border Crossings and the Transnational Migrant Subject" in 18 Harvard Human Rights Journal
85 (2005);"The Legal Regulation of the Family in a Transnational World", Proceedings of the Ninety-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, 198 (2003) ;"Un-veiling Women's Rights in the `War on Terror'", in special issue on Gender and War, 9 Duke Journal on Gender, Law and Policy 211 (Summer, 2002) (partly reproduced in Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Economic, Social, and Cultural Dimensions, a textbook by Jeanne M. Woods & Hope Lewis, 2005);"Collateral Damage: Sacrificing Legitimacy in the Search for Justice", 24:1 Harvard International Review 42 (Spring 2002);"The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Implications for International Women's Rights and Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics", 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal, 1 (Spring, 2002) (partly reproduced in Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Economic, Social, and Cultural Dimensions, a textbook by Jeanne M. Woods & Hope Lewis, 2005).

Daniela Berti

Daniela Berti is a social anthropologist working on North India, and a researchfellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, Paris).Her PhD (1997) was focused on the linguistic interactions which takeplace during possession rituals and on what gives effectiveness tothis particular type of utterance. Other work has covered thedevelopment of divine iconography, local representations of the ritualefficacy, the persistence in contemporary state institutions of politico-ritual roles and practices associated in the past withkingship. In 2002-2005 she coordinated a research programmefinanced by the CNRS entitled The Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva.Local Mediations and Forms of Resistance. She is editing (with N. Jaoul)a volume related to this project which will be published by Pearsons. She is currently working on a project focused on the ethnography oftrial proceedings in Indian District Courts. She carried out my firstpreliminary fieldwork for this project in November 2006, when she a District and Session Judge's Court in a small town inHimachal Pradesh. She is especially working on criminal cases (drugstrafficking and cultivation, dowry cases or sexual harassments), withthe intention of analysing how two opposing versions of facts arebuilt up during the trial: how the examination and cross-examinationof the witnesses are held, how statements are put into written form;how juridical proof is produced; how lawyers defend their case duringthe 'arguments'

Srila Roy

Srila Roy, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Nottingham, UK. Research interests include gender/feminist theory,violence and conflict, cultural memory and trauma, emotions, social movements.