News Type: News

In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Sudheesh R C, Assistant Professor, Social Science, presented on ‘Decolonial Dilemmas in Development Cooperation.’ The seminar was held on July 23, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre.

Abstract

This article examines Triangular Cooperation, which is garnering popularity in the development sector and is purportedly devoid of the old hierarchies associated with international development. The article locates this emerging mode of cooperation in the context of discussions on decolonisation and turns attention to the need to update the registers used to critique international development. Through an analysis of an array of project documents and a reflexive account of the author’s experiences in the aid sector, it explores the subtle forms of power that play out when “pivotal,” “beneficiary” and “facilitating” partners enter a project. The article argues that such an enquiry helps nuance our examination of coloniality in contemporary times. The article thereby calls for renewed attention to Triangular Cooperation in critical development studies that is currently preoccupied with South-South Cooperation.

The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU organised an interactive session on ‘AI in Law’ with Mr. Vasu Aggarwal (NLS BA LLB 2023), Co-Founder of Lucio AI, on July 23, 2025. The session covered current practices, opportunities and challenges for AI providers and legal adopters.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate capabilities that could substantially impact legal operations. For this to come to fruition, there is a need to realise the capacity of lawyers to fully utilise these tools in regular legal tasks. The discussion brought together the two composite stakeholders in this scenario, the service creators and providers in the form of AI-based legal solutions, and the law firm context for which they are designed. The speakers explored the challenges, opportunities and contours of change that present themselves in the meeting of AI and legal practice.

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NLSIU’s HUPA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law organised a book talk on ‘Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India‘ by Dr. Hemangini Gupta, Lecturer, Gender and Global Politics, Department of Politics, University of Edinburgh. The talk took place at the Training Centre at the NLS campus on July 25, 2025.

About the Book

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of “backend” IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. In this talk, we journeyed alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a “Startup India” knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, the author will detail the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labour in India’s current economy.

About the Speaker

Dr. Hemangini’s interests include feminist and queer theory; activism; postcolonial and decolonial theory; cities; labour; capital; technoscience; and racialisation. She has a PhD in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University, Atlanta, US. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminisms, capitalist spaces and temporalities, and labour and technology in the South.

Her current research unfolds along two major strands:

One project is concerned with the transforming conditions of social reproduction under entrepreneurial and platform capitalism. Within this, she has also undertaken collaborative and multimodal ethnographic fieldwork with workers in entrepreneurial companies to innovate with new methods needed to understand work that is fragmented and dispersed across city spaces. Her research focusses on forms of difference within entrepreneurial economies to understand how historical structures of oppression shape access to finance, funding, and possibilities for labour mobility.

A second strand of research queries the ecological costs and entanglements of large scale data projects. Interrogating technological visions for environmental justice, she asks how we might trace the changes in land and water that accompany a move to “cloud” economies. Offering a grounded and historical context to imaginations and practices of ecological futures, this project situates technological future-making within the infrastructural and logistical architectures through which it is materialised.

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NLS faculty Diya Deviah, Assistant Professor of Law, is headed to Yale University for a fully funded six-year PhD in History, starting August 2025. She has also been granted a research award at the University as a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities.

About the fellowship

Diya was nominated and selected to be a 2025-26 Whitney Humanities Centre Fellow in the Environmental Humanities — where she will receive a top-up stipend and join a select group of doctoral fellows from across disciplines, including Anthropology, English, Medieval Studies, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, who share interests in the Environmental Humanities.

Area of study

Diya proposes tracing a global history of the coal commodity frontier in Dhanbad, India’s coal capital, to examine the making of corporate power in modern South-Asia. She is interested in how coal emerges not just as an extractive resource but as a dynamic force, continually reshaping legal, social, and economic boundaries while extending the reach of extractive capitalism into new, often invisible, terrains of power. Through local and archival studies of the company town, railway lines and energy grids, she aims to study how capital works recursively across fossil fuel commodity frontiers in the Indian Ocean.

Closer to her previous work on the entanglements of corporations and the state within constitutional law, one of her central questions examines the historical relationship between law and capital in shaping modern corporate sovereignty. The corporation’s status as a ‘legal person’ grants it special, and foundational, legal immunities, which have been crucial to its ability to exercise sovereign powers. In her doctoral project, she is interested in examining the modes of legal immunity by which corporate sovereignty is sustained over both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Speaking to us, Diya said, “My project lies at the intersection of histories of capitalism, law, and empire. By integrating my interest in environmental studies and science and technology studies (STS), this work extends existing scholarship on corporations, mining and labour into an interdisciplinary exploration of ecology, power, law, and the global networks that shape frontier landscapes and the lives of the actors who inhabit them.”

About the Conference

Organised by the International Public Policy Association every alternate year, ICPP is the largest public policy conference in the world. This edition of ICPP saw 1050 registered participants from 70 different countries.

The NLS Delegation

This year’s delegation is the largest from NLSIU to participate in any edition of ICPP till date. It included:

*Prof. (Dr.) Sony Pellissery, Professor & Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion
*Dr. Devyani Pande, Assistant Professor, Public Policy
*Mr. Manish, Assistant Professor of Law
*Mr. Anubhav Bishen, PhD Scholar
*Mr. Devesh Pandey, PhD Scholar

Contributions of the NLS Delegation

The NLS delegation participated in three panels, as chairs, discussants, and presenters. They also co-chaired a roundtable.

Panels

‘Constitutional Economics for Public Policy’
*Dr. Sony Pellissery chaired the panel.
*Manish and Anubhav Bishen presented a paper at this panel titled “Committed Judiciary and Transitioning Economic Regimes: Policy Challenges to Economic Democracy in India.”

‘Policy Transfer from the Global South’
*Dr. Pellissery was a discussant on the panel.
*In addition, he presented a paper titled “Divergent epistemologies for policy transfer: Comparative Examination of the disciplines of ‘Development Studies’ and ‘Public Policy’,” and was the discussant for the panel.

‘Regulating AI: Governance Challenges and Policy Implications’
*Dr. Devyani Pande co-chaired a session and was a discussant for one of the two sessions within the panel. In the first session, she also presented a co-authored research article on “Public preferences of measures to build trust in high-risk AI:  Variations across Singapore, Seoul, and Tokyo” with Dr. Shaleen Khanal and Dr. Araz Taeihagh (National University of Singapore).
*Devesh Pandey and Anubhav Bishen also presented a paper at this panel, titled “The Right to have a ‘Right to Explanation’: A Global South Perspective.”

Roundtables

Dr. Pande was the co-chair for a roundtable on ‘Governing AI in the Global South: Balancing the Needs, Benefits, and Challenges’ at the conference.

We kicked off the new academic year’s faculty seminars with a presentation by Dr. Rahul Hemrajani, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU, on ‘A Ranking System for Indian Legal Journals.’ The seminar was held on July 9, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre at 2:30 pm.

The co-authors include NLS students Tvisha Vasudevan [IVth year BA LLB], Shrishty Chhaparia [Vth year BA LBB] and Riddhi Puranik [IInd year LLB (Hons)].

Abstract

The Indian Legal Scholarship Indexing Project (ILSIP) is an initiative to create an empirical map of India’s legal‑research landscape, beginning with journal articles published in Indian law reviews. By documenting what kinds of work are published, who the authors are, and how those writings influence scholarship and legal practice, we aim to provide a clear, data‑driven picture of contemporary Indian legal research.

One of the first major outputs of this project —the Indian Law Journals Ranking System (ILJRS) — is an open and systematic ranking system tailored specifically for Indian law journals. Our ranking methodology employs a multi-factor approach, considering elements such as the credentials and affiliations of contributing authors, available citation metrics, and practices like transparent peer-review processes and editorial standards. The initial phase of this project has indexed and ranked 29 generalist law journals, including both faculty-edited and student-edited publications.