Dr Debolina Dutta

Overview

Dr. Debolina Dutta is a Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW) at the Melbourne Law School.

Debolina holds academic degrees in law, literature and cultural studies. She completed her PhD at the Melbourne Law School. Her research is located at the intersections of feminist jurisprudence, criminal law, sexuality studies and gender-based violence. She brings her social movements experience and post-colonial orientation to develop methodologies for collaborative empirical research on criminal law and gender-based violence. She is the author of A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India (Cambridge University Press’ Law in Context series, 2025).

Debolina was previously Associate Professor at the Jindal Global Law School, India and has worked as a sexual rights advocate globally, including at the UN Human Rights Council. She was Residential Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School (2021-2022) and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School (2020-2021).

As a feminist legal researcher, Debolina has had a long-standing relationship with the grassroots sex workers’ movement in India. Her co-directed documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers, on the collectivization of children of sex workers, received the Jeevika: Asia Livelihood Documentary prize in 2012. She received the 2017 Audrey Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights.

At CEVAW, Debolina is leading a research project on access to justice, specifically looking at sex workers’ experiences of law and legal processes. The project will have several outcomes including a multi-jurisdictional feminist inquiry on violence against sex workers which will be held at the Melbourne Law School in 2026.