Her 2019 book “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper,” delves into issues of intergenerational trauma, community memory, and oral histories of human rights defenders. She is the co-editor of the new book, "How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Law Teaching" (Edward Elgard, 2024), in which a diverse set of contributing authors--including Maartje Weerdesteijn, VU Amsterdam)—from various practice areas, across various dimensions of difference, identify principles and strategies for more attentive and holistic teaching.
While introducing her work as an advocate working with victim-survivors of gender-based violence for over twenty years and as a teacher and trainer, Mallika Kaur aims for this talk to provide an opportunity for attendees to reflect on their own experiences and relative challenges in creating and sustaining practices that ethically engage trauma without adopting it. Rejecting any fixed prescriptions for "wellness" or "self-care," Mallika will also open a conversation around the range of possible strategies on how to recognize and navigate trauma-responses (at times of various players with disparate interests), within the context social justice work--drawing from her work in South Asia and in the United States, and seeking possible applications in European contexts.
Kaur received her Master in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and her Juris Doctorate from the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she currently runs the Domestic Violence Program and teaches the course she developed on “Negotiating Trauma, Emotions, and the Practice of Law.” She is the Executive Director of Sikh Family Center, a community-based gender justice organization that she co-founded.