NLSIU is organising a talk on ‘Closing the Gap between Rights and Justice’ by Prof. Maya Unnithan, Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Sussex on January 16, 2026 at 11.10 am.

Abstract 

A human rights-based approach provides a significant framework with which to conceptualise and advance change in systems where gender inequality and injustice permeate. However, there are often gaps between a rights-based approach and the realisation of justice. In the talk, Professor Unnithan will draw on insights from on-the-ground engagement with legal processes and reproductive rights, feminist scholarship on justice, as well as Amartya Sen’s ideas on the moral basis of justice, to suggest new ways of imagining rights which capture everyday complexities in an inclusive frame of reproductive justice.

About the Speaker 

Maya Unnithan is a Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Sussex, working at the intersections of reproduction, global health, international development, and human rights. Her early scholarship, articulated in the monograph Gender, Poverty and Identity: New Perspectives on Caste and Tribe in Rajasthan (1997), provides a rich ethnographic account of the kinship, caste and gender politics in northern India. From 2000s onwards, her research has focussed on biopolitics, notions of body-self, and bodily autonomy in the reproductive life course, health governance and activism in India and UK (with reference to infertility, contraception, assisted reproductive technologies, surrogacy, abortion, and prenatal sex selection). These concerns are developed in her later monograph Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics: Reimagining Rights in India (2019).

At the University of Sussex, she also  leads the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health (CORTH).