CSLS Alumna Dr Shruti Iyer Wins Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize

The Oxford Centre for Socio-legal Studies is delighted to announce that Dr Shruti Iyer has been announced as this years winner of the Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize for the best PhD thesis.  Shruti was an MPhil and then a DPhil student at the Centre until 2026, under the supervision of Professor Linda Mulcahy.  Her work on  “Silicosis and the State: Valuing Life and Labour in Contemporary India” examined how silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to silica dust, has become a site of political struggle involving workers, activists, and the state. Building on uniquely rich ethnographic work in Rajasthan, India, this research shows that, while the state designed silicosis compensation primarily as a humanitarian response to suffering—translating injury into monetary compensation through bureaucratic procedures, workers and activists reinterpret and mobilize these programs for broader political ends. The study shows that welfare institutions function not only as mechanisms of bureaucratic governance, but also as arenas where political claims, solidarities, and reinterpretations of state responsibility emerge.

The Law and Society prize committee uniformly noted that this dissertation presented a vivid, engaging, and beautiful ethnography of a case and setting that were both unique and carefully connected to broader contexts and theories across a surprising breadth of disciplines and subject areas. The committee appreciated the dissertation’s intensive and rigorous methods, including both a detailed analysis of the legal development of the Indian government’s policy establishing a silicosis welfare scheme, as well as an intensive observation of the implementation of this policy on the ground, as negotiated by labourers, patients, doctors, and unions. In particular, they appreciated not only the author’s interdisciplinary engagement with literature from tort and labor law to medicine and public health to theories of welfare state action, but also their engagement with how differently-situated individuals make moral and political meaning of the law. Throughout, the author centered the agency of unexpected actors from factory laborers to terminally ill patients and their families. In sum, by tracing silicosis across bureaucratic procedures, legal claims, and activist campaigns, this work shows how welfare programs can simultaneously individualize suffering and enable collective political mobilization.

Since gaining her DPhil at Oxford, Shruti has taken up a post at the University of Cambridge.