Kalpana Kannabiran is a sociologist, and legal scholar based in Hyderabad, India, whose work focuses on the intersections of constitutional studies, human rights, sociology, law, literature, gender studies, and social movements.
A rights educator for communities in struggle, she has worked closely with social movements and advocacy groups over three decades, on initiatives for legal and constitutional literacy and is a certified mediator. She has published 27 books with leading publishers, and led major research projects on gender studies, adivasi rights, disability rights, and regional studies, to name a few.
She is author of Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (2012), and Law, Justice and Human Rights in India: Short Reflections (2021), among others. She has edited and translated The Speaking Constitution: A Sisyphean Life in Law by KG Kannabiran (2022) and edited Law, Justice, Society: The Selected Works of Upendra Baxi, Vol III: Law and Society (2025). She is editor of two volumes of Routledge Readings on Law (2022 and co-editor of Voices of Resistance: Telugu Progressive-Political Literature (2023), part of the Dakshinayan Indian Thought Series. She is currently Section Editor, ‘Gender, Law and Legal Institutions,’ Oxford Intersections: Gender Justice, a new global initiative of Oxford University Press. An independent human rights columnist with close to 100 op-eds in national print and online news platforms, she has authored over 80 book chapters and journal articles, and reviews books regularly for major journals.
Dr. Kannabiran is recipient of the VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research in 2003, the Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists in 2012, both awarded by ICSSR in recognition of her work in the field of interdisciplinary law, and the International Network of Genocide Scholars Impact Award 2022. She served a 3 year term as Civil Society Advisory Governor (Asia), Commonwealth Foundation, London from January 2020 to December 2022 and is a Jury Member for the INFOSYS Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2024 & 2025. She is currently President of Research Committee 05: Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnicity, and Member of the EDI Task Force, International Sociological Association, 2023-2027.
Kalpana Kannabiran’s CV