Malini Chidambaram is a PhD candidate at Melbourne Law School and a Research Assistant with the ARC Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law. Prior to her doctoral studies, Malini worked as an Assistant Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Child and the Law at National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru. She continues as a faculty member for the Postgraduate Diploma in Child Rights Law (PGDCRL) at NLSIU, where she teaches the course Child Rights, Policy, and Law: International and National Framework.
Malini holds a BA LLB (Hons) from Jindal Global Law School, where she received awards, including the Ashwin Maharaj Gold Medal, Outstanding Law Leadership Gold Medal, Dean’s List Award, and Dean’s Award for Outstanding All-Round Performance. She completed her LLM at the University of Melbourne as an Alex Chernov Scholar and participated in the Polish and International Legal Studies Programme at the University of Gdańsk as an Erasmus+ ICM Scholar, focusing on Poland’s role as the state that initiated and shaped the early stages of drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Malini’s current research projects centre around four themes: law and the visual; childhood and the modern state; critical jurisprudence; and family and personal laws. Some of Malini’s writing have been published in the Global Studies of Childhood, Oxford Reports on International Law in Domestic Courts, TWAIL Review, Alternative Law Journal, and Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies Her artworks have been featured in the Indian Feminist Judgments Project, and she was also awarded the Michel Scott Art Prize in 2025.
Thesis Title
Children’s Rights, Visual Culture and the Modern State
Thesis Summary
As a part of her doctoral research, Malini will examine how the visual brings into relation law, childhood and the modern state. Her work engages with the research question: How do the meanings of children’s rights change through the deployment of imagery by international law and by a Third World state? Through archival research, the thesis will demonstrate how such representations have influenced the framing of children’s rights in both global and postcolonial legal contexts. Attending to this makes visible the ways in which statemaking is shaped through the figure of the child.
Supervisors
- Child and the Law
- Critical Legal Pedagogy
- Family Law
- History of International Law
- Law and the Humanities
- Postcolonial Feminisms
- Visual Cultures