Dr Shruti Iyer
- College positions:
Research Fellow in Law
- Subjects: Law
Degrees
DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies (University of Oxford), MPhil in Socio-Legal Research (University of Oxford), LLB in Politics, Philosophy and Law (King鈥檚 College London)
Research interests
Legal anthropology, informal work, occupational health and safety, social movements, the welfare state, South Asia
Teaching interests
Law, political economy, anthropology of development, welfarism, social movements, labour
Awards/prizes
Rhodes Scholarship, India and St Antony's (2019)
Socio-Legal Studies Association Fieldwork Grant (2023)
The Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2022)
Other interests
Reading, film, photography, cooking, music
Biography
Shruti is a legal anthropologist with broad interests in morality and ethics, the changing welfare state, compensation for harm and injury, and trade unionism and workers' struggles. Her doctoral thesis was an ethnography of how activists, workers, doctors, and bureaucrats negotiated a welfare programme for communities impacted by silicosis, a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling dangerous dust, in Rajasthan, India. Her current work considers how the state and legal systems place an economic value on human life, and investigates the contestations that this produces on the ground.
Shruti's research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Rhodes Trust, and the Socio-Legal Studies Association, among others. She holds a DPhil and an MPhil in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Oxford, and an LLB in Politics, Philosophy, and Law from King's College London. She has taught in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London, and was the Teaching and Learning editor for the online blog for the Society for the Anthropology of Work.