Annapurna Waughray

Annapurna Waughray is Professor of Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK where she has been a faculty member since 2001.  She is a critical legal scholar and activist academic. Her research focuses on human rights, minority rights, discrimination and equalities, in particular caste and the law in India / South Asia, in international human rights law and in the Indian diaspora especially the UK and US.

She holds a BA and MA from Cambridge University where she studied Modern Languages and Social and Political Sciences. She holds an LLM in International and European Law and a PhD in Law from Liverpool University School of Law and Social Justice. She has worked in non-profits in women' rights and health rights and is a qualified lawyer, working as a litigation solicitor before moving into academia.  She has written, published, and spoken widely on caste discrimination and the law for over twenty years. She is the co-author of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission's Research Reports on Caste in Britain (2014), and was a member of the expert advisory group to the United Nations on its Guidance Tool on Caste and Descent-Based Discrimination. 

Her recent book Capturing Caste in Law: The Legal Regulation of Caste Discrimination is published by Routledge and is available in paperback and hardback and as an e-book in the UK and India. She is concerned with the uses of law in shaping social change, the potential of the law for those on the receiving end of discrimination, inequality and injustice, and the promotion of legal literacy on caste and caste discrimination and the law among fellow lawyers and non-lawyers including academics, activists and policy actors.