Cambridge Socio-Legal Group Seminar: 'Unseeing Like a State?': Contesting the Politics of Ignorance and Industrial Deregulation in Contemporary India'

Speaker: Dr Shruti Iyer (Research Fellow in Law, University of Cambridge)

Modern states regularly enumerate, survey, account, inspect, and audit their populations. But what happens when states do not count, survey, and audit? What effects can this lead to? How is this experienced and contested? This paper critically considers how the state’s failure to collect information can operate as an agnotological tool—generating ignorance by making something deliberately unknown. I draw on sixteen months of participant observation in the life of a trade union and social movement in Rajasthan, India, to foreground how campaigns for surveys and audits are critical sites where marginalised people contest official ignorance of their working and living conditions. This sheds light on the registers through which social movements mobilise the law outside the courtroom, and the relationship between knowledge practices and claim-making in an era of accelerated industrial deregulation.  

Shruti is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She is a socio-legal scholar and a legal anthropologist with broad interests in morality and ethics, the changing welfare state, compensation for harm, 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 Rajasthan, India. This project was awarded the Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize in 2026 and was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, as well as the Socio-Legal Studies Association. Her current work considers how the state and legal systems place an economic value on human life and investigates the contestations that this produces on the ground.

Lunch will be available from 12:30.

This event is a hybrid event. If you are in Cambridge, please do join us in the Faculty. To attend online you must register via Zoom.

Find out more about the Socio-Legal Group.