Law & Justice Scholar Programme

Collaborative learning and knowledge production are at the very core of CJLS's vision of bridging the gap between academia and activism through its pedagogical interventions and community interactions. In our endeavor to advance radical social transformation through collaborative engagements at the intersections of academia and activism, CJLS introduced the Law & Justice Visiting Scholar Programmme in 2022 to create spaces for scholars and activists working on issues of law and marginalisation to hold critical conversations in classrooms. The Law & Justice Scholar Program is a unique opportunity for an individual to interact with students and fellow scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds at the Jindal Global Law School (JGLS).

The Law & Justice Visiting Scholar Program will offer young researchers, activists, and academics working at the grassroots level the opportunity to teach/co-teach a 2-credit course on a subject that addresses a key contemporary issue of law, marginalisation, and social justice at JGLS. Through this program, CJLS will annually offer one individual the position of a Visiting Scholar to take on a teaching role at JGLS.

The scholar will also have access to all the institutional and infrastructure facilities that are made available to all faculty members, including library and remote access services, along with an official email address. In addition to the 2-credit course, the scholar will also conduct one public lecture on a contemporary social issue addressed in the course curriculum.

Law and Justice Scholars

Vqueeram

Law and Justice Scholar 2024

Elective course on

Trans Justice and the Law Clinic

As Visiting Scholar, Vqueeram is co-teaching the clinical course on Trans Justice and the Law Clinic.  The course engages with conceptial nuances around gender and sexuality, queer theory, knowledge and power, critical legal theory and intersectionality, among others.

Students will explore legislative and judicial histories, interact with community activists and scholars, and build advocacy skills to understand and address the multifaceted oppression faced by these communities, with a focus on legislative and policy measures in India. Students will participate in clinical pedagogy, involving self-reflective exercises, politics of knowledge production, minor knowledges’, journal entries, and intensive writing workshops.

In the picture, Nikita Sonavane with short hair, is wearing a blue dress and a bright smile

Nikita Sonavane

Law and Justice Scholar 2023

Elective course on

Policing, Caste & Carcerality in India

Nikita will be teaching this elective course in the upcoming August. This course will grapple with normative questions around law, caste and carcerality in the context of policing. This course will specifically focus on tracing the origins of policing through various criminal laws and legal provisions while situating the embeddedness of the institution of policing within structures of casteist carcerality. It will draw from socio-legal histories of policing, postcolonial theories and empirical accounts of policing along with anti-caste and anti-carceral formulations on criminalisation.

In the picture, Disha Wadekar is wearing a patterned white saree with a black sleeveless blouse

Disha Wadekar

Law and Justice Scholar 2022

Elective course on

Caste, Courts & Constitution

As Visiting Scholar, Disha taught an elective course on Caste, Courts & Constitution. This course was designed to fill the academic gap in the study of caste, courts, and the Consitution of India. It offfered an anti-caste lens in analysing court made law and attempt to interact with the actors in the justice system to understand how caste supersedes the normative modern law. It poses the question; in a society entrenched in the "lawless law of caste, what can be done to uphold the rule of law?”