The NLSIU Library Committee and Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSNet) are co-organising a Book Talk on the book A Jurisprudence of Conversations, authored by Dr Debolina Dutta and published by the Cambridge University Press in 2026.

Panellists: Dr Debolina Dutta, Prof Dianne Otto, Malini Chidambaram
Moderator: Keertana Venkatesh

Date and Time: Saturday, 11 July 2026, 12 noon (IST) [virtual event]
Link: Click here

About the book:

How do feminists, as lawyers and activists, think about, and do law, in a way that makes life more meaningful and just? How are law and feminism called into relation, given meaning, engaged with, used, refused, adapted and brought to life through collaborative action? Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian academic practices. Its method of conversation and accountability continues the feminist tradition of taking reciprocity and the time and place of collaboration seriously. By bringing legal academics and sex worker activists into conversation, the book helps make visible the specific ties between post-colonial life and law and joins the work of refusing and reimagining the hierarchical formation of legal knowledge in a caste-based Indian society. A significant contribution to the history and practice of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India, A Jurisprudence of Conversations will appeal to both an academic and an activist readership.

About the author:

Dr Debolina Dutta is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Law School with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. She was previously an Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School and a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. She is the author of A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Life, Law and Feminism in Post-colonial India. Debolina has published widely in the areas of jurisprudence, feminist ethics and criminal legal regulation of sexuality, and most recently in the Edward Elgar Research Handbook in Law and Literature, the Australian Feminist Law Journal, the International Journal of Law in Context, and Global Public Health. For her academic and creative works on sex work and law, Debolina received the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights and the Jeevika Asia Documentary Film Prize. Her next book, Elements of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956 In Context, is forthcoming from CUP in 2027.

About the discussants:

Prof Dianne Otto is a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her scholarship explores how international legal discourse reinforces hierarchies of nation, race, gender and sexuality, and aims to understand how the reproduction of such legal knowledges can be resisted. Key publications include: the edited collection, Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018); with Emily Jones, ‘Queering International Law’ in Tony Carty (ed), Oxford Bibliographies Online: International Law (2023); and ‘The Third World and the Quest for Peace’ in Tony Anghie et al (eds), TWAIL Handbook/Reader (Edward Elgar, 2025).

Malini Chidambaram is a Law Academic Associate and a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School. Her doctoral research explores how law and visual culture work together to lend legal authority to the promise of a rights-based approach for the protection of children in international law. Her recent work includes ‘A pedagogy of play: on living and killing ‘serious’ Family Law’ (International Journal of Law in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2026, forthcoming) and ‘Daughters of Development: The Public-Private Partnership in Visualizing Girls’ Education in Postcolonial India’ (Global Studies of Childhood, Sage Journals, 2025).