Raghavi Viswanath
Post doctoral researcher
Email: raghavi.viswanath@eui.eu
Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts project. She was previously a doctoral researcher in Law at the European University Institute in Florence. Her project, supported by the Nuffic-Beurs scholarship, proposed a multimedia, ethnographic re-articulation of the grammar and politics of cultural rights in international human rights law using counterhegemonic epistemologies. Her doctoral thesis was anchored on collaborative fieldwork with the Irulars, a semi-nomadic community based in southern India.
Raghavi holds postgraduate degrees from Leiden Law School and the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor of Arts and Law degree from the National Law Institute University (India). Her areas of interest include international human rights law, cultural heritage law, sensory approaches to law, and research ethics for lawyers. She has convened several special issues of journals and workshop series on themes including epistemic divides in heritage policy, rethinking ethics review processes, the role of language in critical work, and eco-casteism. Raghavi takes great interest in teaching, having taught undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Torino, the European University Institute, the National Law School of India University, the University of East London, and the University of Salamanca.
Alongside her PhD, Raghavi has cultivated a strong profile as a policy interlocutor. She is a member of the ICOMOS Our Common Dignity Rights-based Approaches to Culture Working Group, a consultant for cultural rights collectives in India and Kenya, and a Research Fellow at the Global Citizenship Observatory in Florence.
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