SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Overview

Name:

Dr Prabha Kotiswaran

Biography

Prabha started teaching at SOAS in 2006 as Lecturer in Law. She received her undergraduate law degree in India from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and then an LL.M. and S.J.D. (doctorate) from Harvard Law School. She also practiced law for four years at the New York law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton.

Prabha’s main areas of research include feminist legal theory, law and social movements and of late, an economic sociology of law as it pertains to third world cities. At SOAS, she teaches Criminal Law, Feminist Legal Theory, Law and Social Movements and Law and Society in South Asia.

Her dissertation research focused on a feminist rethinking of the normative status of sex work drawing on field work in two Indian sex industries and an exploratory analysis of the economic impact on these markets of various models of legal regulation including decriminalization, abolition and legalization. Emerging from this is her monograph Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, published by Princeton University Press (2011) and co-published by Oxford University Press, India (2011). Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor recently won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics. She has also edited a reader on Sex Work published by Women Unlimited (2011) for a Series on Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism. This work was funded by the AHRC, which features it as a case study. Arising from advocacy related work in this context, Prabha is also interested in theories of law and social movements in the postcolonial context. Drawing on this research, Prabha is working on a critique of contemporary anti-trafficking law and on a book-length work analyzing the legal regulation of markets in social reproduction from a feminist perspective.

She is currently co-organising with her colleagues, Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Diamond Ashiagbor a workshop titled Towards an Economic Sociology of Law to be held at SOAS in September 2012 based on which they will co-edit a special issue of the Journal of Law and Society (2013).