MSAS Seminar: Hate Crime las as Meliorst Hope: Seeking justice for caste atrocities in Rajasthan
Tuesday 26 November, 2:00pm
Pavilion Room, St Antony's College
Speaker: Sandya Fuchs (Bristol)
Hate crime laws, which criminalise violent expressions of prejudice, have faced growing criticism. Scholars have argued that hate crime legislation relies on the collaboration of legal institutions that are themselves shaped by histories of prejudice and fail to bring justice to survivors of identity-based violence. But what does it mean for a hate crime law to be successful? And to whose vision of justice are hate crime laws accountable?
Sandhya Fuchs is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a legal anthropologist by training, and her work explores the relationship between legal institutions, histories of marginalization, and culturally embedded concepts of truth, violence and justice in India. Sandhya’s first book entitled “Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India,” analyses how Dalit communities in India experience and creatively mobilise India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes /Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Meanwhile, Sandhya’s current research explores what historical narratives, and temporal models Indian Supreme Court Justices mobilise when evaluating hate speech accusations. Sandhya’s research has been published in various journals, such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social and Legal Studies and Contemporary South Asia.
