Centre for Women’s Rights
About
Our Team
Announcement
CFWR in the Media
About
Centre for Women’s Rights (CFWR), formerly known as Centre for Women, Law and Social Justice, envisions an inclusive and equal society, where every woman will be able to live her life to the fullest potential, with freedom from want and freedom from fear, particularly of violence. Towards this, the Centre has initiated pioneering research on contemporary issues pertaining to women’s rights. The Centre’s work foregrounds the pursuit of inclusive and inter-sectional justice through state level, national, regional and international forums, by adopting feminist and inter-disciplinary approaches. With an academic commitment to high-quality research, the Centre also contributes to wider legal thinking on issues pertaining to social justice. It endeavours to bridge the gap between women’s rights activism at the ground level, feminist lawyering in courts, progress made on women’s studies and work undertaken by the academia.
The Centre’s work focusses on four specific areas, which are as follows:
- Violence against women
- Women’s rights to equality and non-discrimination
- Women, peace and security
- International law, human rights standards and women’s rights
On these four focus areas, the fulcrum of the Centre’s work is its research activities, particularly socio-legal and action research. The Centre strives to undertake research through collaborations with other universities, governmental entities and non-governmental organizations. Additionally, CFWR also engages in discourses and deliberations, capacity building and advocacy initiatives.
To know more about the Centre and its work, please find the concept note here.
Our Team
Director – Prof. (Dr.) Saumya Uma
Saumya Uma is a recipient of the British Chevening scholarship on human rights. She has over 28 years’ combined work experience as an academic, law researcher, lawyer, trainer, writer and campaigner on gender, law and human rights. She has served as a research consultant on human rights, with international agencies such as the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP), United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (UNOHCHR) and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Her doctoral research was on formulating a legal framework for victim and witness protection with a specific reference to gender-based violence. Her current interests are: a) examining family law through a feminist perspective; b) victim and witness protection; c) freedom of religion and women’s rights; and d) situating women’s rights within the international human rights framework. She is presently preparing a book manuscript on violence against women and the Indian legal responses. For more details, see here.
Fellow – Dr. Sagnik Dutta
Sagnik Dutta’s research lies at the intersection of political theory, political anthropology, critical socio-legal studies, and feminist and critical international relations. Their doctoral research explored how debates on minority rights, gender, and religion in political theory can be de-parochialised by studying the meanings of these categories in the everyday life of social movements led by women. Their other strand of research focuses on counterterrorism, gender, and de-colonial approaches to security. For more details see here.
Senior Research Associate – Ms. Surabhi Singh
Surabhi Singh is a graduate of NLIU, Bhopal as well as the University of Toronto, where she was the recipient of the women’s rights fellowship. She hopes to combine her experience as a women’s rights practitioner with her academic and research interests. Some of these include gender based family law reforms in India and access to justice and the intersection of women’s health and rights in the context of gender based violence. Within these, she is particularly interested in research methods that prioritise ethnographic experiences of women, particularly those with socio-economic vulnerabilities (with courts or law enforcement) and research that uses these as a site of law reform and for enhancing access to justice. She is also interested in feminist pedagogy and methods for academic curriculum development. For more details, see here.
Research Associate – Prof. Diksha Sanyal
Diksha Sanyal graduated with a B.A. LL.B. from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2016 and was a recipient of the Felix scholarship in 2019 which enabled her to pursue an LLM in Human Rights, Conflict and Justice at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is interested in understanding the interrelationship between law and social change especially in the context of queer and feminist movements. Her master’s thesis explored the continuities and ruptures between queer and feminist positions on domestic violence. Through her work she hopes to better understand the legal regulation of non-normative intimacies, care, and vulnerability within contemporary neoliberal structures. For more details, see here.
Research Assistant – Ms. Akshata Ahire
Akshata Ahire was a practicing Advocate in Bombay High Court, and has worked in New Era Juris Law Firm as Jr. Associate. She took up cases related to Human rights and Constitutional law. She received her Bachelors of Arts (Philosophy) and later Bachelors of Law from University of Mumbai. She also has a Diploma in Human Rights from the same university. Further, she pursued Masters of Law in Access to Justice from Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai. Her research interest has always been inclined towards minorities rights, intersectionality of gender, women and marginalized women rights, thus selecting her dissertation topic as “Justice for Weak – A myth or reality; an analysis of sexual violence against scheduled caste women in Marathwada.” She, pictures herself as an author, researcher and an academician and that would be small act of paying back to society. For more details, see here.
Announcement
- International Women’s Day – on 9th March 2022
- Webinar series: Ear to the Ground – webinar #2 ” Intersectionalities and Incarceralities” 30th March 7.00 PM to 8.30 PM
- Webinar Series: Ear to the Ground – Webinar #3 “Re-imagining intimacies Re-imagining Kinship” held on 13th April 2022 from 7.00 PM to 8.45 PM
- Webinar Series: Ear to the Ground – Webinar #4 “Women and the Far Right” will be held on 27th April 2022 from 7.00 PM to 8.30 PM
CFWR in the Media