HEAD OF DEPARTMENT JunProf. Dr. Sandhya Fuchs

I am a political and legal anthropologist who works at the intersection of social anthropology and socio-legal studies. I explore the relationship between legal institutions, histories of violence and 'hate', and culturally embedded concepts of truth, hope, and justice. A central focus of my work has been the 'social life' of hate crime laws in India and the South Asian diaspora in the UK and South Africa: through long-term ethnographic work across communities and legal institutions, I examine how people across South Asia understand, experience, and find agency and hope within constitutional and criminal justice systems that promise to address social and political histories of oppression. My research also examines the role that legal forms, performances and institutions play in creating public affects and modes of historical consciousness, and how legal and political ideas, vocabularies, and aspirations travel transnationally.

My first book, Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024), draws on long-term fieldwork with survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police and the judiciary in the Indian state of Rajasthan to examine how Dalit communities interpret and mobilise India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Fragile Hope argues that the Act has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labour can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that shape Dalit lives. Through the intimate lens of personal narratives, the book shows how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice, generating new controversies, inequalities and hopes. Fragile Hope won the James Busuttil Prize for Human Rights scholarship, awarded by the Royal Asiatic Society, and the 2025 APLA Book Prize in Critical Anthropology, awarded by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

My current research focuses on the Indian Supreme Court, analysing how Hindu nationalist ideologies shape judicial arguments about injury and harm in hate speech cases brought against religious minorities and Dalits, and how those arguments in turn generate new historical discourses; the project treats the courtroom as a stage for the performance and disruption of political projects and asks how its politicization shapes experiences of exclusion and belonging. I am also developing a project on the digital migration of culturally coded modes of hate speech from India to the Indian diaspora in the UK and South Africa, asking how vocabularies of exclusion change meaning as they cross national and cultural boundaries and how they are locally adapted and politically mobilised in new contexts. In addition, I am part of a UKRI-funded research team examining the experiences of epistemic injustice that women from racially minoritised backgrounds face in the UK criminal justice system. My research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Laura Bassi Foundation. It has appeared in reputed journals such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), Social and Legal Studies, and Contemporary South Asia.

Since 2026 I have served as Co-Convenor of LawNet: the legal and political anthropology network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). In November 2026 I will join the board of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA), a section of the American Anthropological Association. I am also a member of the European Society for Criminology’s ‘Hate Research Working Group’ and host the Leverhulme-funded podcast Hate Speech across the World. I have collaborated with human rights organisations and legal aid centres in India, including the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS), the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) in Delhi, and the Centre for Dalit Rights (CDR), Jaipur. Previously, I was Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Bristol, where I remain a Visiting Researcher. From 2021 to 2024 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor in Philosophy and Anthropology from Colby College, Maine, USA.