
Dr Sandhya Fuchs
BA, MPhil, PhD
Current positions
Lecturer in Criminology
School for Policy Studies
Contact
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Biography
My research centrally examines what role law can play in addressing structural inequality in post-colonial contexts. Alongside my academic world I have worked with human rights organisation and legal aid centres in India and Germany to better understand how historically marginalised communities experience and mobilise the legal system in line with their own institutional histories and cultural notions of justice. I have collaborated with the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies and the National Movement for Justice in Delhi, as well as the Food First International Action Network in Germany.
I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which I completed in 2020. At LSE I was affiliated with the International Inequalities Institute (III). I also hold an MPhil degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Philosophy from Colby College, Maine, USA, and a Certificate in Indian Constitutional Law from the Live Law Academy of India. I am a graduate of the United World College of Southern Africa (UWCSA) in Eswatini. My research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service.
Research interests
My research examines issues of law, hate and historical inequality. I explore the relationship between legal institutions, experiences of violence, and social imaginaries of hope, justice and restitution in the context of polarized political landscapes in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in Europe and South Africa. Located at the intersection of anthropology and critical legal studies, my work analyses the potential of state law and human rights regimes to address structural inequalities and counteract culturally specific forms of oppression.
My first book entitled Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit (communities formerly considered 'untouchable' within the Indian caste system) survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Fragile Hope unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). The book shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labour can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Using the intimate lens of personal narratives, Fragile Hope lays bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes.
My current research focuses on the Indian Supreme Court and analyses how Hindu nationalist ideologies shape judicial arguments around injury and harm in hate speech accusations levelled against religious minorities, and how these arguments, in turn, generate new historical discourses. The project analyses how court rooms can become a stage for the performance and disruption of political projects and interrogates how the politicization of court rooms shapes experiences of exclusion and belonging among different communities.
I am currently developing research that focuses on the digital migration of locally-rooted modes of hate speech and culturally specific concepts of "othering". I ask how hateful ideas change meaning as they traverse cultural boundaries and investigate how politially malleable vocabularies of exclusion can me moblized by authoritarian governments.
I am accepting PhD students. Please email me to discuss your research proposal.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
From Delhi to Leicester: Hindu Nationalist Violence in the Indian Diaspora
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School for Policy StudiesDates
01/01/2024
Hate Speech in India: Judicial Politics of History and Memory
Principal Investigator
Description
Leverhulme Early Career FellowshipManaging organisational unit
School for Policy StudiesDates
01/01/2022 to 01/01/2024
The Language of Change: Dalit Voices and Institutional Actors in India's legal landscape
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School for Policy StudiesDates
01/07/2016 to 01/01/2018
Publications
Selected publications
01/09/2024Truth Clashes
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Fragile Hope
Fragile Hope
Constitutional Law as Moral Insurgency
Leading Works in Law and Anthropology
Recent publications
01/03/2025Supreme Histories
History and Anthropology
Symbiotic Justice
Social and Legal Studies
Colonizing Kashmir: state-building under Indian occupation by Hafsa Kanjwal, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2023, xiii + 366 pp., $32, ISBN 978-1-5036-3603-3
American Ethnologist
A Conversation with Sandhya Fuchs
National Law School of India Review
Constitutional Law as Moral Insurgency
Leading Works in Law and Anthropology