Jun 17 2025 to Jun 17 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

What would justice look like if it spoke in a queer voice? How might legal judgments shift if they were written through the lived experiences and realities of LGBTQIA+ individuals?

In this session, we explore the bold and imaginative work of The Queer Judgments Project, an initiative that seeks to re-think, re-write, and re-invent legal judgments through queer and complementary perspectives. Emerging from a series of conversations among scholars, activists, and legal thinkers, the project asks a vital question: how could legal decisions involving sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics be expressed differently, more inclusively, more justly?

At the heart of the discussion is the project’s first major output: an edited collection that offers 26 re-imagined judgments and commentaries from across the globe. Through this collection, contributors bring their diverse disciplinary backgrounds and personal insights to bear on the law, queering traditional frameworks and imagining alternative approaches to legal reasoning.

This session will engage with the creative, critical, and deeply personal work that underpins these re-written judgments. It will reflect on how the project aims not just to critique existing legal structures but to open up new possibilities for justice that better reflect the experiences of LGBTQIA+ and other minoritized communities.

This year, BIC celebrates Pride Month through a series of programs that embrace Queerness as it is — unconforming, changing and alternative. Every program aims to embody the fluid and non-normative possibilities of existence that queerness creates, while fostering a community that welcomes difference in an unbending society, whether that be through new models of living or unique modes of self-expression. Pride, Insists Upon Itself!

Speakers

Divya Kandukuri
Activist & Writer
Divya Kandukuri is an Ambedkarite feminist activist, trainer, writer and development professional. She is the founder of ‘The Blue Dawn’, a mental health collective that upholds anti-caste and feminist politics in its functioning. ‘The Blue Dawn’ has been working on bringing discussions on caste and mental health to the forefront of India’s mental health discourse through its social justice lens towards mental health. Divya has also been a trainer for ‘The Blue Dawn’ and works with social workers, media professionals, and mental health professionals to equip them with tools to incorporate discussions on the caste system, feminism and social justice into their practices. In addition to her work with ‘The Blue Dawn’, she is an independent media practitioner and writer. Drawing from her lived experiences as an inter-caste, inter-faith individual, she focuses on inter-relations of caste, gender, pop culture, and mental health.

Previously, Divya also worked as Research and Program Coordinator at Zubaan, a feminist publication house and an active archiver of feminist and women’s movements in South Asia. Her role involves working with Zubaan Projects, which works with a particular focus on historically marginalised and oppressed groups.

Siddharth Narrain
Assistant Lecturer of Law, National Law School of India University
Siddharth Narrain is an Assistant Lecturer of Law at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore and the Faculty Director of the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at NLSIU. Siddharth was part of the team of lawyers representing Voices Against Against 377; Parents of LGBTI Persons; and Mental Health Professionals in the litigation challenging the constitutionality of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code before the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court.

Manavi Atri
Lawyer & Researcher, Alternative Law Forum
Manavi Atri is a human rights lawyer and researcher working at Alternative Law Forum. She works with the LGBTQIA community on issues of self identification, harassment and the realisation of fundamental rights. She monitors the patterns of news coverage, their relationship to people and politics in Kannada media through her work with Campaign Against Hate Speech. She also appears before self-regulatory bodies in cases of ‘unethical’ reportage by the media as a way to challenge media impunity.

Her co-authored work includes, Asserting Dignity in Times of COVID, Right to Love, Wages of Hate: Journalism in Dark Times, Criminalizing the Practice of Faith and From Communal Policing to Hate Crimes, a report on Dakshina Kannada.

Senthorun (Sen) Raj
Reader of Human Rights Law. Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr Senthorun (Sen) Raj is a Reader of Human Rights Law at Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University. Sen’s academic and advocacy work take an intersectional approach to examining the relationship between emotion, culture, race, gender, sexuality, and law across different jurisdictions. He is the author of Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025).

He currently serves on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies and Palgrave’s Socio-Legal Studies Book Series. Sen is also the former chair of Amnesty International UK. His most recent book, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), explores how emotions structure socio-legal conflicts relating to LGBT people in Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States with a focus on religious exemptions to equality laws, legal gender recognition, bans on conversion practices, and sex education in schools.

Raju Behara
Poet & expressive Arts Practitioner
Raju Behara is a non-binary disabled poet and expressive arts practitioner whose work centers queerness, disability, and anti-caste resistance through hybrid forms like blackout and found poetry. Their practice focuses on chronicling and re-imagining erased histories of queer-trans communities via community-led initiatives, including a trans-led expressive arts cohort with the Piravi Art Community.

In 2022, they initiated Redefining Queerscapes, a movement using workshops to transform legal texts into protest poetry, archived in the Queer Judgments Project and multiple anthologies. Their debut collection, Withering Tempests (2021), explores pandemic isolation, and their writing appears in journals and queer collectives. As an EQUAL fellow and a collaborator with the Asia Pacific Trans Network, Raju documented systemic healthcare barriers faced by trans youth and founded Queer & Quarantine, a crisis-intervention initiative.