Dr Shruti Iyer

Shruti is a legal anthropologist with broad interests in morality and ethics, the welfare state, compensation for harm, and trade unionism and workers' struggles. Her doctoral thesis was an ethnography of how activists, workers, doctors, and bureaucrats negotiated a welfare programme for communities impacted by silicosis, a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling dangerous dust, in north western India. Her current work considers how the state, legal systems, and insurance providers place an economic value on human life and investigates the moral contestations that such valuations produce in practice. 

Shruti's research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Rhodes Trust, and the Socio-Legal Studies Association, among others. She holds a DPhil and an MPhil in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Oxford, and an LLB in Politics, Philosophy, and Law from King's College London. She has taught in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London, and was the Teaching and Learning editor for Exertions, the online platform for the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW).