Current Doctoral Student Joint PhD Program in English and Women's and Gender Studies
She/Her/Hers
About
Asha's work explores the relationship between systems of power and the individual body, and in particular how law excludes embodied knowledge. She argues that justice requires expanding what counts as epistemically legitimate within legal frameworks, especially the knowledge carried by bodies that do not conform to law's expectations.
Background
She came to these questions through reproductive justice and women's health, organizing with the Abortion Fund of Arizona and FLORECER (formerly Pro-Choice Arizona) and working with the Refugee Women's Health Clinic in Maricopa County. That clinical work grounded her undergraduate thesis on how medical, legal, and international systems of biopower act on refugee women who have undergone female genital cutting. In law school she extended these questions of bodily authority across the species line into ecofeminist and environmental legal discourse. Her article "Toward Interspecies Reproductive Justice" (Animal Law Review 32.1, published as Asha Ramakumar), which won the 2023 Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program Writing Prize, argues for including nonhuman animals within reproductive justice frameworks.
Prior to beginning her doctoral work at Michigan, Asha practiced as a commercial litigator at a large firm and then as a public interest litigator with the Center for Food Safety, suing federal agencies under FIFRA, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental statutes. That practice grounds her larger project: tracing how law, as a human construct, limits the ways a body can exist and express itself. Her doctoral work brings humanistic epistemologies to legal theory, reading modernist literature through crip and disability studies, ecofeminist theory, and critical legal studies to challenge law's assumptions about normativity and reasonableness. Her essay in progress on Virginia Woolf's Orlando examines how Orlando's subjective experience, unfolding across centuries, unsettles the novel's legal undercurrents, and its logic of property in particular.
Asha also writes Alive Together, a Substack where essays on law, gender, species, and the environment sit alongside poetry and personal narrative.
Areas of Interest
Law and Literature; Property Law; Administrative and Environmental Law; Critical Legal Studies; Reproductive Justice; Animal Studies; Modernism; Disability and Crip Studies; Ecofeminism; Environmental Humanities; Visual Art; Performance, Dance, and Movement
