Vidya Ramachandran

Vidya is a DPhil candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professor Fernanda Pirie and Dr. Lena Rose, explores migrant women victim-survivors´ (in)voluntary return migration to their countries of nationality, which is more widely known as ´transnational marriage abandonment´. Through fieldwork with women carrying derivative/dependent visas in the UK, and women who have returned to India, this research will examine the political, legal and social structures that allow dependents to be routinely and lawfully removed from their countries of migration; and these structures´ continuing impacts for returned women in their countries of nationality. She is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship. 

Vidya completed the MSc in Migration Studies at Oxford in 2020. She was awarded the 2020 Border Criminologies Master's Dissertation Prize, and funded by a Rotary Global Grant Scholarship and St Cross College Worldwide Scholarship. 

In 2021-22, Vidya was a research assistant on ´The Politics of Capital Punishment in the Middle East´ project at Oxford´s Centre for Criminology, and an Associate Tutor for courses in Legal Systems and Methods and Criminal Law at Birkbeck, University of London.

Before Oxford, Vidya worked in migrants' rights' advocacy in Australia, the UK and Greece. She received a BA/LLB from the University of New South Wales, Sydney.