Skip to main content

Search NYU Steinhardt

Salwa works at the intersection of law and digitality, specializing in legal pluralism, databases, automation, and women's rights. Her dissertation – Digitizing Law: Legal Pluralism and Data-Driven Justice – examines how the digitizing and automating of law impact subaltern women in the Global South. Working across digital media studies and legal anthropology, she conducts a comparative analysis of secular state courts and community-based non-state courts (shalish) in Bangladesh to demonstrate how the construction of digital legal databases and use of legal automation (AI Judges) can generate outcomes that are harmful for marginalized communities in the non-West.

Salwa is currently a Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School, working as the Director of ISP's Majority World Initiative. She is also a Research Fellow at Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST).

Grants and awards for her research include the Mellon-SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), NYU Digital Humanities Fellowship, NYU Global Research Initiative Fellowship, and American Institute of Bangladesh Studies: Graduate Student Fellowship. She won the Society of the History of Technology's (SHOT) Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize (2022) for her paper-presentation of “Digital Databases: Colonial Legacies Reinscribed in Technologies.” She was awarded first place in the NYU Steinhardt Research and Showcase Competition (2022). Her paper "Law and Digitality: Tracing Modern Epistemologies and Power" won the Asian Journal of Law and Society's Best Paper award in the Graduate Student Paper Competition (2021).

Her research draws from her interdisciplinary background. She holds a Master of Arts in South Asia Studies (concentrations: Political Theory and History) from Columbia University. Her M.A. thesis explores how the meaning(s) and development of secularism in Bangladesh is complex, and explains why the concept cannot be treated as a universal category – both in theory and in praxis. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and English (Honors) from the University of Washington.

Salwa is the lead instructor for several courses at NYU: Global Media and International Law; Theory of the Digital; Rise of Internet Media; Media Audience

Selected Publications

  1. “Neocolonial Digitality: Analyzing Digital Legal Databases Using Legal Pluralism,” Asian Journal of Law and Society (2023), Volume 10 , Issue 3 , October 2023 , pp. 516 - 549 https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2023.9
  2. “Rethinking State Law: A Comparative Study of Digital Evidence in State and Non-State Courts,” Law and Social Inquiry (Accepted)

Programs

Media, Culture, and Communication

Our media studies programs train agile researchers of a shifting media landscape. Learn to analyze media and technology in its cultural, social, and global contexts.

Read More