Mallika Kaur is the co-founder (2009) and Executive Director (as of 2021) of Sikh Family Center, the only Sikh American organization focused on gender-based violence. Working with local civil society, academic institutions, advocacy organizations, and government agencies, she combines research, advocacy, scholarship, and the law as an approach towards sustainable change.
An interdisciplinary author, lawyer, teacher, and community organizer, Kaur’s work and scholarship focuses on human rights with a specialization in gender and minority issues. She has worked with victim-survivors of gendered violence for two decades, including as an emergency room crisis counselor, expert witness on domestic violence and sexual violence, researcher, and attorney.
Kaur received her Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard and JD from UC Berkeley Law School, where she currently also runs the Domestic Violence Field Placement program and teaches courses that engage students in questions about violence, trauma, redress, and the law’s possible efficacy towards individual and systemic transformation. She also teaches the course she pioneered on “Negotiating Trauma, Emotions & the Practice of Law.”
Kaur believes what happens inside a home is intimately connected to what happens inside communities as a whole: since struggles are interconnected, commitment to justice must never be selective. In South Asia, she has worked on a range of issues including farmer suicides, female feticide, and transitional and transformative justice. In the United States, Kaur has worked with the Sikh community and other immigrant communities on issues including post-9/11 violence, civil remedies for intimate violence, policing practices, political asylum, and racial discrimination.
With a commitment to weaving collaborative networks of change, Kaur has a track record working with diverse populations within and outside the Sikh community. She has designed creative preventative programs for Sikh Family Center and also regularly provides technical assistance and training to partners.
Kaur’s book “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper” focuses on Punjab’s human rights defenders and intergenerational and transnational trauma. Her recent co-authored book is on transformative legal pedagogy: “How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Legal Teaching.” She writes regularly for online and print media as well as academic publications; her work has been published in Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and California Law Review, among others. Mallika trains lawyers as well as non-lawyers on cultural humility, elimination of bias, and negotiating trauma.