Shruti Iyer

Shruti Iyer is a DPhil candidate in Socio-Legal Studies, under the supervision of Linda Mulcahy. She is a 2019 Rhodes Scholar at St Antony's College, and completed her MPhil at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in 2020. Her doctoral project is an ethnographic study of a government welfare programme for communities affected by silicosis (an occupational lung disease) in Rajasthan, India. It asks how moral values come to influence how the state places an economic value on human life, and investigates the contestations surrounding state policy on worker health. 

She is a recipient of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) PhD Fieldwork Grant and the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Shruti has worked as a TA in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London (2020-21 and 2021-22), and was awarded the Graduate Teaching Assistant Award from the School of Politics and Economics in 2021-22. She also edits the Teaching and Learning section of Exertions, the web publication for the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

Shruti graduated in Politics, Philosophy and Law (2016) from King's College London, and later worked as a researcher at the Centre for Equity Studies in New Delhi. She has conducted fieldwork on a range of informal labour issues, and prepared teaching curricula on exclusion in contemporary India. She has previously co-convened the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Discussion Group at the University of Oxford, and a fieldwork support group for scholars working in the Global South.