NLSIU will host a special lecture on ‘Gendered Technology: Navigating Law, Data, and Social Justice’ by Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa from the University of Technology Sydney on July 25, 2024, 5 PM.
Abstract
Can technology be harnessed for social good? And what is the law’s role when it comes to addressing the gendered harms of new technologies? Set in a context where the world is still over a century away from closing the gender gap, Associate Professor Vijeyarasa will discuss her motivations for going beyond the boundaries of the law to offer new solutions to address gender inequality globally. Drawing from her experiences as the architect of the Gender Legislative Index, she will share her thoughts on why law, technology & data offer new potential to make the world more equal. On the flip side, drawing from her recent research on the gendered harms of artificial intelligence (AI), Dr Vijeyarasa will share emerging good practices on how to regulate and address the biases that underpin AI. She will also share her advice, from her first foray to her most recent experiences using technology for social justice as a ‘data outsider’, as well as her insights on the role of women in data, data science & technology.
About the Speaker
Ramona Vijeyarasa is a legal academic and women’s rights activist. An Associate Professor in the Faculty
of Law at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), she is the designer behind the award-winning Gender Legislative Index, a collaboration with Rapido Social and the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre, a tool that uses human evaluators and machine-learning to assess how well laws work for women. Her career began as a corporate lawyer in Sydney. Driven by a passion for human rights, her focus unsurprisingly shifted to international women’s rights law. Ramona’s decade working in civil society has taken her from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, capturing the stories of survivors of domestic violence, to the floating villages of Cambodia, where she supported women’s demands for better access to reproductive health care. As a legal activist, Ramona has helped advance anti-trafficking victim reintegration networks in Vietnam and Ukraine, filed briefs before the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Moldova and the Supreme Court of the Philippines and made submissions to United Nations treaty bodies. This rich experience informs her impact-driven approach to research, where sound methodologies are created to deliver tangible change in order to improve lives through the law.
Excerpts from the lecture:
“So as someone who spent many years working overseas, I was really motivated by the fact that gender inequality is a global challenge that has not been resolved in any country in the world. I see the law and technology as coming together to help to create a solution. In short, I wanted to create an index to help measure whether the law was getting it right, to measure whether the law can do better in terms of advancing women’s rights.”
“I started my research on making laws more responsive to women’s rights and after some time I arrived at a point where legal or policy knowledge or solutions I had were not enough. I needed help. I needed to collaborate and started looking to data scientists and software engineers to do that. First I had to actually figure out that they were the people I needed.”
“The end result of my search for collaborators outside of law was a partnership with software engineers at UTS Rapido Social – a low-bono/pro-bono team of engineers in our Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology – and with data analysis and visualisation experts at the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre. I owe them many thanks for believing in my vision for a tool to demonstrate better whether law is playing its part to correct inequality and advance women through the Gender Legislative Index.”
“The Global Legislative Index (GLI) is an interface used to measure how effectively domestic laws respond to women’s needs and interests. It is grounded in international women’s rights but has the capacity to evaluate individual provisions of domestic laws, not just indicate whether or not a law exists. It is powered by a mix of human and machine learning.”
About the book 
Dr. Sanjeev Routray is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He completed his PhD in sociology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Routray is a sociologist-anthropologist, critical urbanist, and migration specialist of South Asia and beyond. His areas of expertise include urban poverty, political and legal mobilizations, transregional migration, and caste and labor market negotiations. He is the author of The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (2022, Stanford University Press) and his articles have appeared in leading journals including International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, and City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, and Action. Dr. Routray has received fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation (UK), The Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (UK), Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation (Germany), International Development Research Centre (Canada), and the Hari Sharma Foundation for his research and writing.
Hon’ble Mrs. Justice B V Nagarathna will deliver the conference closing keynote on the topic ‘Home in the Nation: Indian Women’s Constitutional Imaginaries’. This closing keynote address will be delivered on August 3, 2024, 5 PM, at The Falcon’s Den, Prestige Falcon Tower No. 19, Brunton Road. Hon’ble Justice Bangalore Venkataramiah Nagarathna is a Judge of the Supreme Court of India. She served as a Judge of the Karnataka High Court from 2008 to 2021. She is in line to become the first female Chief Justice of India in 2027. The poster for this session can be accessed 
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta will deliver the opening keynote address on August 2, 2024, 9:15 AM, at the NLSIU Training Centre. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, and President, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. He has previously taught at Harvard, Ashoka University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and has been Global Faculty at NYU Law School. He has published widely in political theory, history of ideas, Indian constitutional law and politics in India. He is the author of The Burden of Democracy (Penguin 2003) and has produced several edited volumes. He is (most recently) co-editor with Madhav Khosla and Sujit Choudhary of The Oxford Handbook to the Indian Constitution. His forthcoming work looks at philosophical ideas about religion in 20th-century India. The poster for this session can be accessed 
NLSIU’s 
About the speaker 
and author of ‘
Nivedita Menon is a Professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her latest book is Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (Permanent Black and Duke University Press 2023). Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books are Seeing like a Feminist(2012/updated 2nd Edition 2022), Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and (co-written) Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007/2nd Edition 2014). She is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders). She has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.
