Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings is a recent publication by UVic Law professor Pooja Parmar.
About the Book
As calls for reparations to indigenous peoples grow on every continent, issues around resource extraction and dispossession raise complex legal questions. What do these disputes mean to those affected? How do the narratives of indigenous people, legal professionals, and the media intersect? In this richly layered and nuanced account, Parmar focuses on indigeneity in the widely publicized controversy over a Coca-Cola bottling facility in Kerala, India. Juxtaposing popular, legal, and Adivasi narratives, Parmar examines how meanings are gained and lost through translation of complex claims into the languages of social movements and formal legal systems. Included are perspectives of the diverse range of actors involved, based on interviews with members of Adivasi communities, social activists, bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, and judges. Presented in clear, accessible prose, Parmar’s account of translation enriches debates in the fields of legal pluralism, indigeneity, and development.
About the Author
Pooja Parmar is an Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. She is interested in questions of legal epistemology and legal pluralism. Parmar is currently working on projects related to rights of Indigenous peoples, and the legal profession. Her published research has examined aspects of international human rights, right to water, indigeneity, legal history, international law, intersections of law and colonialism, regulation of the global economy, and law and development. Before entering academia, Parmar practiced law in New Delhi for several years.
