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Biography
Shruti Iyer is a first year 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 dissertation is an ethnographic study of stone-carving and quarrying communities in Rajasthan, where workers contract silicosis as a result of hazardous working conditions. Her research asks how workers and their families live with chronic illness and create infrastructures of care, what the impact of silicosis is in its interaction with other infectious diseases (such as tuberculosis), and how workers negotiate with the state's medical authorities and labour officials to claim government compensation for workplace disease. Her MPhil examined how the emergence of state compensation in India is directly linked to the legal binary of the formal/informal worker. It drew on a transnational colonial history of labour law in Britain and South Africa to demonstrate how the legal construction of formality has generated new forms of advocacy as well as the ascendance of human rights discourse in India to win protections for informal workers.
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. While at King's, she worked under Professor Ben Bowling as an Undergraduate Research Fellow on race relations legislation in the UK and its links to immigration and policing, as well as on the use of new technologies of law enforcement. At the Centre for Equity Studies, her research was on the Indian state's evolving relationship to sanitation workers. She also conducted fieldwork on a range of informal labour issues, and prepared teaching curricula on exclusion in contemporary India.
Shruti has teaching experience in political science research methodology, and worked as a TA at the Department of Political Economy at King's College London (2020-21).