Book Lunch: Gendered Bodies and Worlds of Labour: Re-Conceptualising Dignity after Puttaswamy vs. Union of India (New Delhi: Zubaan 2024)

Kalpana Kannabiran and Devi Jagani

With readers: Divya Ravindranath, Harini Raghupathy & Ruby Bhardwaj

When: Friday, 13 December 2024, 12pm – 1.30pm (GMT) / 5.30pm – 7pm (IST)

Where: Online (MS Teams)

The unanimous decision of the nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India in the case of Puttaswamy points us in the direction of pathways towards a re-imagining of the gendered worlds of labour. In this short monograph, we examine the specific implications of Puttaswamy and the constellation of cases around it for our understanding of gendered labourscapes, drawing on a range of rich scholarly works in the field of labour studies in India and relying on relevant case law around constitutional concerns not limited to or specifically about labour, but contributing to a situated understanding of the worlds of labour. In doing so, we also attempt to establish the centrality of constitutional values and of an intersectional, interdisciplinary reading of jurisprudence (case law) to the idea of inherent human dignity in work worlds and beyond, noting the dense interconnections between the two.

Authors' Biographies:

Kalpana Kannabiran is a sociologist and legal scholar based in Hyderabad, India. She is currently Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi and has completed a three-year term as Civil Society Advisory Governor (Asia Region), Commonwealth Foundation, London, January 2020—December 2022.

Kalpana Kannabiran has taught sociology, law and gender studies and published widely across the fields of interdisciplinary law, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies and sociology. Her book Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (Routledge, 2012) was the first to open out a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, intersectional exploration of the fundamental right to non-discrimination in India. A compilation of her public writing in The Hindu, The Wire, and Scroll is published as Law, Justice and Human Rights in India: Short Reflections (Orient BlackSwan, 2021). She is co-author of Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy: A Feminist Re-Reading of Puttaswamy vs. Union of India (2021) and has edited Law, Justice and Society: Selected Works by Upendra Baxi, Volume 3: Law and Society (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025).

Devi Jagani is an independent legal researcher and lawyer. She graduated from the Institute of Law, Nirma University in 2018 with a BA, LLB (Hons.) and from the University of Oxford in 2019 with a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL). Her areas of interest include jurisprudence, constitutional law, criminal law, gender studies, human rights, and discrimination law.

She has co-authored the third edition of General Principles of Criminal Law (with Dr. K.N.C Pillai and Renjith Thomas), a book that discusses the foundational principles of substantive criminal law through a pedagogical approach that marries the case law method with the Socratic method of learning.