Leela Jadhav
Leela Jadhav’s work takes place across legal, literary, and spatial registers. She maps current and emerging asymmetries of power as they configure a class of people, and a set of ecologies, that are socially and economically excluded from the future.
Through the use of case studies - real and hypothetical - she aims to develop a contemporary jurisprudence through which new legal strategies and norms can emerge to meet the conditions of the current moment. She theorises law’s (helpful) function in two directions: reactive - to check existing systems of economic power; proactive - to structure a more progressive political horizon.
Her recent project, From Legal Fictions to Fictive Reality, used ethnographic research in Northeast India’s coal-mining regions to interrogate how the Sixth Schedule encodes colonial and contemporary ideas of indigeneity. As the 2023-24 Forensic Architecture MA Fellow, she investigated compressed and expanded forms of legal and economic time, culminating in a board game - ‘Compulsory Improvement’. She led legal research on FA’s report ‘A Spatial Analysis of Israel’s Conduct in Gaza’, submitted as evidence to the International Court of Justice, and is currently undertaking the Bar course as the Middle Temple Astbury Scholar and Inderpal Rahal Memorial Trust Award recipient.