91探花

Biography

Dr. Santvana Kumar is Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), 91探花. An interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar, her work develops critical frameworks for understanding caste, gender, identity, and legal subjectivity through the experiences of Dalit women. Situated at the intersection of law, feminist theory, and critical social thought, her scholarship examines how legal institutions shape, reproduce, and contest structures of power, difference, and marginalization.

Her doctoral research, Conceptualising Dalit Women’s Experience and Identity: A Socio-Legal Study, develops a theoretical framework for understanding Dalit women’s experience beyond homogenizing categories of caste and gender. Drawing upon socio-legal analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, Dalit feminist thought, Black feminist theory, and critical legal theory, her work interrogates dominant legal and academic approaches to marginalization and advances Dalit women as a distinct analytical and political category for rethinking questions of identity, difference, legal subjectivity, and justice. Her scholarship contributes to emerging conversations on Dalit feminist jurisprudence and socio-legal theory by foregrounding the relationship between caste, gender, experience, and legal knowledge.

Dr. Kumar's research has been presented at leading national and international academic forums, including Brandeis University, the British Association of South Asian Studies, and the Indian Association for Women’s Studies. She was also among a select group of scholars chosen from South Asia to participate in the External Programme of The Hague Academy of International Law.

Her publications and research engage questions of caste, gender, law, and social justice. Her forthcoming book chapter, Temporalities of Oppression: The Legal Time Warp in Dalit Women’s Justice, examines the relationship between caste, gender, and legal temporality. Her current research explores atrocity, legal indeterminacy, and the production of difference within legal and social orders, with particular attention to how legal categories are produced, contested, and transformed through struggles over power, identity, and recognition.

At JGLS, Dr. Kumar teaches courses relating to constitutionalism, legal theory, gender and law, human rights, and interdisciplinary approaches to law and society. Her pedagogical approach is informed by critical inquiry, reflexive learning, and a commitment to creating intellectually rigorous spaces that encourage engagement with questions of power, inequality, and social transformation.

Having lived and studied across diverse cultural contexts, Dr. Kumar brings a comparative and transnational perspective to her scholarship and teaching. Through her research, teaching, mentorship, and institutional engagement, she contributes to ongoing conversations on caste, gender, law, and justice in India and beyond, while advancing more inclusive approaches to legal knowledge and social change.