Asha Amdur

Asha (Ramakumar) Amdur's work explores the relationship between systems of power and the individual body. As an attorney, Asha is particularly focused on how law excludes embodied knowledge. She first came to this work through reproductive justice, organizing with the Abortion Fund of Arizona and FLORECER (formerly Pro-Choice Arizona). She then extended these questions of bodily authority across the species line, incorporating reproductive justice into ecofeminist and environmental legal discourse. Her article "Toward Interspecies Reproductive Justice" (Animal Law Review vol. 32.1, published under "Asha Ramakumar"), which was awarded the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program Writing Prize, argues for including nonhuman animals within reproductive justice frameworks.

Prior to her doctoral work, Asha practiced as a public interest litigator at the Center for Food Safety, suing federal agencies under FIFRA, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental statutes to hold the government accountable to law. 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 literature for the challenge it poses to law's assumptions about normativity and reasonableness through crip and disability studies, ecofeminist theory, and critical legal studies. Her current essay on Virginia Woolf's Orlando questions law's claim to monetary remedies and property ownership through a legal subject who defies legal categorization.