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Cambridge’s Shruti Iyer bags LSA 2026 Dissertation Prize
The dissertation examined how silicosis welfare programs in Rajasthan became a site of labor and political mobilization.
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Malvika Choudhary - Thu, 28, May 2026
- 18:11 EDT
- 23
Shruti Iyer / law.ox.ac.uk
The Law and Society Association (LSA) awarded Shruti Iyer, a researcher at Cambridge University, the 2026 Dissertation Prize for her research on silicosis, labor, and welfare policy in India.
Her dissertation, “Silicosis and the State: Valuing Life and Labour in Contemporary India,” examines how silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to silica dust,became a political issue involving workers, activists and the state in Rajasthan.
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“The dissertation examines how silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to silica dust, has become a site of political struggle involving workers, activists, and the state,” the association said in its citation announcing the award.
Congrats to Dr. Shruti Iyer of @Cambridge_Uni for winning LSA’s 2026 Dissertation Prize for “Silicosis and the State: Valuing Life and Labour in Contemporary India”!
— Law and Society (@law_soc) May 28, 2026
View all winners here: https://t.co/uljaZwVzpv pic.twitter.com/b0xCJFzIVx
According to the LSA, the dissertation draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Rajasthan and analyzes how government compensation programs for silicosis patients were implemented and negotiated by laborers, patients, doctors and unions.
The study argues that while the state framed compensation largely as a humanitarian response, workers and activists used welfare programs to press broader political claims and reinterpret state responsibility toward labor and worker health.
The award committee said the dissertation combined legal analysis, public health research and welfare state theory with on-the-ground observation of communities affected by occupational disease.
It also noted the project’s interdisciplinary engagement with tort law, labor law, medicine and public health, as well as its focus on how people in different social positions “make moral and political meaning of the law.”
The committee further praised the dissertation for centering the experiences of factory workers, terminally ill patients and their families, while also reflecting on the ethical and class dynamics involved in conducting research in rural working-class communities as an urban elite researcher.
The Law and Society Association said the work showed how welfare programs can simultaneously individualize suffering and create spaces for collective political mobilization.
Iyer is currently a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She completed her DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies in 2025 after earning an MPhil from the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in 2020.
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