AKSC 6th Annual Conference 2025

Annapurna Waughray is Professor of Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK where she has been a faculty member since 2001. She is a critical legal scholar and activist academic. Her research focuses on human rights, minority rights, discrimination and equalities, in particular caste and the law in India / South Asia, in international human rights law and in the Indian diaspora especially the UK and US.

She holds a BA and MA from Cambridge University where she studied Modern Languages and Social and Political Sciences. She holds an LLM in International and European Law and a PhD in Law from Liverpool University School of Law and Social Justice. She has worked in non-profits in women's rights and health rights and is a qualified lawyer, working as a litigation solicitor before moving into academia. She has written, published, and spoken widely on caste discrimination and the law for over twenty years. She is the co-author of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission's Research Reports on Caste in Britain (2014), and was a member of the expert advisory group to the United Nations on its Guidance Tool on Caste and Descent-Based Discrimination.

Her recent book Capturing Caste in Law: The Legal Regulation of Caste Discrimination is published by Routledge and is available in paperback and hardback and as an e-book in the UK and India. She is concerned with the uses of law in shaping social change, the potential of the law for those on the receiving end of discrimination, inequality and injustice, and the promotion of legal literacy on caste and caste discrimination and the law among fellow lawyers and non-lawyers including academics, activists and policy actors.

Original speaker biography

Prachi Patankar is a writer and activist based in New York. Her speaking and organizing is grounded in feminist, anti-caste, and solidarity commitments. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, Indian Express, Al Jazeera, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Jacobin. She has been invited to speak at venues such as MoMA PS1, Cornell University, Swarthmore College, and Harvard University. Patankar has been interviewed in media including Democracy Now, Jewish Currents, and National Public Radio.

Patankar was raised in rural India, by a freedom-fighting grandmother and parents who led feminist and working-class movements. For over two decades in New York, she has been involved in work which links the local and the global, police brutality and war, migration and militarization, race and caste, women of color feminism and global gender justice.

Patankar has worked on a diversity of innovative projects to link justice movements between the United States and the Global South. This includes a range of work with CAAAV, Palestine Education Project, and Afghan Women's Mission. She believes in the power of intersectional and international visions and strategies — which resonate across Dalit rights and Black lives, migrant justice and gender justice, to build bottom-up change from the local to the global.

Original speaker biography

Sandy Perry was raised as a Quaker in Massachusetts and attended Stanford University from 1967-70. He has been a lifelong community organizer and justice advocate, especially after moving to San Jose in 1990. He has been blessed with a 51-year, loving marriage with Andrea Villaseñor Perry, and they have a daughter Christina, son in law Ben, and two grandchildren, Max and Lucia.

In 1991, Sandy joined both the Affordable Housing Network and what is now known as CHAM Deliverance Ministry, and became an active volunteer in both for over thirty years.

Over the years, CHAM helped lead and organize countless rallies, marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, speak-outs, teach-ins and building takeovers to support housing for the unhoused. In 1997, Sandy collaborated with CHAM and First Christian Church to open the church as a shelter for unhoused families. It successfully defied City efforts to shut its doors and then helped create the CHAPP and PROGRESS pilot housing programs.

In 2001, Sandy participated with both CHAM and Affordable Housing Network in successfully advocating for 30% of San Jose's affordable housing funds to be allocated to the extremely low-income families who needed it the most. Affordable Housing Network was instrumental in the campaign to strengthen San Jose's rent control program from 2015-18. In 2017, it helped organize low-income tenants at Sunnyhills Apartments in Milpitas to save their homes, when the owner proposed to opt out of his HUD contract, demolish the apartments, and build million-dollar townhomes instead.

Sandy was a commercial roofer for 20 years and then helped manage the CHAM-First Christian Church homeless shelter from 2000-09. From 2017-20 he was active in efforts by Serve the People San Jose to stop the ill-advised Google expansion into San Jose. In 2019 he helped found the South Bay Community Land Trust and currently serves as vice president of its board.

Original speaker biography

Dr. Roja Suganthy-Singh was born in Vellore, Tamil Nadu and moved to the US in 1990 pursuing higher education. With a PhD from Rutgers University, New Jersey, she is now Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, at St. John Fisher University, Rochester, NY where she currently resides. Singh widely contributes to building a multicultural and equality in based culture in the Rochester community and University campus through antiracism, anticaste and interfaith leadership work. She brings together leaders from the Rochester community addressing and implementing refugee students' education and initiatives. As a South Asian Dalit feminist scholar, Roja Singh's ongoing activism, research and writings are primarily based among grass roots Dalit women leaders and Dalit communities in rural Tamil Nadu, India. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, class, caste, indigeneity, religion and gender using critical caste lens, post-colonial and transnational feminist frameworks.

Roja is co-founder and co-leader of Dalit Solidarity Forum in the USA, established in 1999, one of the oldest Dalit rights organizations in the USA. She serves on the Executive council and Board of India Civil Watch International. Providing a global humanism outlook, Singh provides lectures and dialogues on a wide range of subjects including Dalit Feminism, earthy humanness, race, gender, caste, religion, class, sexuality, cross cultural interactions, world cultures, indigenous cultural studies, and global gender studies. Working closely with US based South Asian diaspora organizations she advocates for democratic principles along with anti-caste and for-compassion and equality initiatives. She continues to be deeply involved in human rights work in Tamil Nadu, India, and in the US promoting right to education for girls and youth from minority communities. Along with a team, Roja has developed curriculum and workshop materials for college, high-school and other communities for teaching about the dangers of caste practices and to foster a vision for an alternate universe free of caste. She works with young Dalit, Bahujan, and all marginalized scholars, and aspiring writers to edit, enhance and hone their writing for scholarly publishing. Her book, Spotted Goddesses: Dalit Women's agency-narratives on caste and gender violence, is widely recognized and used in universities and activism circles in the US, UK, Australia, and India.

Original speaker biography