Dr. Sandhya Fuchs – Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Busuttil Prize Winner Lecture)

Join us for the award of the Busuttil Prize for human rights to Dr Sandhya Fuchs for her book Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India.

Sandhya Fuchs is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the LSE, a MPhil degree in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Colby College, USA. Sandhya specializes in legal anthropology, and her work explores the relationship between legal institutions, histories of marginalization, and culturally embedded concepts of truth, violence, hope and justice in India. Sandhya’s first book entitled “Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India,” analyses the social life of India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes /Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Her recent research explores what historical narratives, and temporal models Indian Supreme Court Justices and advocates mobilize when evaluating hate speech accusations.  Sandhya’s research has been published in a variety of journals, such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social and Legal Studies, and Contemporary South Asia.