Chatting with Ramona Vijeyarasa

Welcome to the latest interview of the Völkerrechtsblog’s symposium ‘The Person behind the Academic’! With us we have Prof. Ramona Vijeyarasa, and through the following questions, we will try to get a glimpse of their/her/his interests, sources of inspiration and habits.

Welcome Prof. Vijeyarasa and thank you very much for accepting our invitation!

May I first ask what it was that brought you to academia and what made you stay?

That’s a great question as I was one of those people who never anticipated being an academic. I was conferred my PhD in 2013, having undertaken a comparative study of Vietnam, Ghana and Ukraine. I sought to challenge the myths and misconceptions embedded in law and practice about who the victims of trafficking are and how and why people end up in situations of exploitation. But by then I had found my ‘dream job’ and was working as a women’s rights activist at the international NGO ActionAid. Soon after, I was heading their women’s rights team and I stayed with them through countless wonderful visits to local communities all around the world. However, after the birth of my two daughters, I wanted to travel less, and while I passionately supported the NGO campaigns we ran at ActionAid – including mobilising against gender-based violence in urban spaces – I was missing the rigour of academic research and the independence academia offers to design and deliver really cutting-edge women’s rights scholarship. So I joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney in 2017 and have loved it ever since.

If you were not an academic, what would you be?

That really depends on how pragmatic I am feeling and which ‘sliding door’ moment in life I look back upon. My passion for the law always made being a barrister an incredibly interesting option. These days, I really value the possibility of communicating to educated and passionate but non-expert audiences, so I often think journalism would be a fascinating career. Imagine being on the front line, reporting to the rest of the world what they cannot see from communities who want their stories to be told…

But I have also declared 2025 the year of the cupcake and am working my way through a rather long list of recipes! I love cooking and often think that if I had what it takes to survive a professional kitchen, I would love to be a chef. A few years back, I challenged myself to cook a new dish every week. That was tough (and I think it was also the year I published my last book) so it was definitely a busy year!

How did your research interest in women’s rights and gender equality arise?

I never grew up in a feminist household, but I have two older sisters and no brothers. I think this made a huge difference. Within my own home, we were all treated the same, with no distinction on gendered grounds. I went to two all-girls schools over 13 years of education – which is not uncommon in Australia but I know very unusual in other countries. I was educated to believe women could be anything we wanted to be and did not suffer discrimination on gendered lines at school either. There was no mansplaining there! Of course, this all changed when I went to university and law school and came to appreciate how much our world is shaped by gendered assumptions, norms and expectations.

If I had to identify a tipping point, I would say it had to do with academic literature and my undergraduate studies. I did a combined Arts/Law degree and subjects such as “Lesbos to Lewinsky: A history of western sexualities” and “Sex, Gender and Justice” exposed me to so much incredible feminist scholarship. Studying “Women in Southeast Asian Societies” really made visible to me the women in the global South who were leaders or activists or part of NGO coalitions. All of that fostered my interest in women’s rights work.

I would be remiss not to credit my career before academia too. My first paid role in women’s rights was at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. I co-wrote briefs for the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Moldova and an Inquiry request to the CEDAW Committee, all centred around women’s choice. That was amazing, a true career highlight and all of those international women’s rights principles that I engaged with during that work very much frame my thinking today.

Of course, I think a desire to contribute to the struggle for equality globally is something that is innate for many. It certainly is for me.

Which are three texts that you would wish all academics working on international law would read?

Anything that exposes fellow academics to feminist and TWAIL thinking. I would recommend Hilary Charlesworth’s, ‘Talking to Ourselves? Feminist Scholarship in International Law’, in Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law (2011) which I think is also a great challenge to feminist scholars to develop feminist methodologies. I have also found both  Caroline Omari Lichuma’s, ‘(Laws) Made in the “First World”: A TWAIL Critique of the Use of Domestic Legislation to Extraterritorially Regulate Global Value Chains’ (2021) 81 ZaöRV: Zeitschrift für Ausländisches Öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht and Robtel Neajai Pailey’s, ‘De-Centring the “White Gaze” of Development’ (2020) 51 Development and Change 729 incredibly thought-provoking articles.

What is your favourite place to read and write? What is always near you when you read and write?

I get a little lost in my writing, especially when I am deep in the process, so I can really write anywhere, so long as I have the ideas in my head and a laptop at hand. Occasionally, if a great idea comes to me when I am out walking or watching my girls play hockey, I dictate the words to myself on my phone! Of course, only to re-read them later and have a little laugh as I wonder if it was really that great an idea in the first place!

Ideally, I always have coffee nearby. Sometimes it sits next to me getting cold, but it’s always there.

What is an energy and inspiration booster, at times when you have none?

While it may sound odd to some, if I am lacking inspiration, forcing myself to get words on paper often works for me. Many years ago, I attended a training run by an Australian company called iThinkWell. They have excellent resources for researchers and while they are often pitched at PhD candidates, they are tools that stay with researchers throughout their academic lives. They make compelling points about writing habits and avoiding waiting for inspiration. At least three times a week, I try to get new words on paper, even if it is just writing new material for 30 minutes.

Have you ever drawn influence from any form of art in your work? Is there anything artistic about teaching or writing academic texts?

I am currently undertaking a very exciting project, commissioning artists to interpret the chapters of my new book, Rewriting the Rules: Gender-responsive Lawmaking for the Twenty-First Century which is due out in early 2026 with University of California Press. This has taken me down many new and interesting pathways – exploring collage, miniatures, sculpture, film, illustrations and 2D animation – and the very hard task of trying to understand how an artist might feel interpreting my written words. The exhibition will accompany the book’s launch in the lead up to International Women’s Day 2026. So stay tuned.

How interesting! I am definitely looking forward to both the book and the exhibition.

Which of your publications is your favourite one? And which of them is your least favourite?

I am very proud of my last book, The Woman President: Leadership, Law and Legacy for Women based on Experiences from South and Southeast Asia. The book was a study of what difference women leaders make on the lives of fellow women through the laws that are enacted during their tenures. At the time the book went to print, there were only around 30 female presidents and prime ministers worldwide. That’s extremely low, out of 200 or so countries. Women have never occupied more than around 15 per cent of executive positions world-wide. I think it is because of this absence of women from Executive Office that we have forgotten to talk about their presence. So I am proud of the book’s contribution to offer a critical study – the good and the bad – of how women lead, how law changes and which women benefit when a woman occupies such a powerful role.

As for the least favourite, I recently contributed to a fantastic new project called the Australian Feminist Legislation Project. We have re-written laws from a feminist perspective, paying homage to the feminist judgments project that came before. I rewrote Australia’s Modern Slavery Act. I am still unsure if I have found the right balance between the pragmatism that writing legally-plausible legislation requires and the transformative vision that eradicating exploitation in the supply chain will actually take. I think this is an ongoing dilemma for projects of this kind.

If you could, which advice would you give to yourself at the early stages of your career?

Really value your mentors. They may change as you move through different stages of your career, but they will be invaluable in helping you mull over different opportunities, tackle difficult situations and make good choices.

If you could, which unspoken rule of academia would you instantly erase?

I had what is often called an ‘untraditional career path’ into academia. I did my Masters in International Legal Studies at NYU School of Law and then practised as a women’s rights lawyer in New York and elsewhere, undertook my PhD and then went back to the NGO-sector, before returning to tertiary education as a full-time academic. I would challenge the idea of a singular pathway and really urge others to think differently about this important intersection between academia and the spaces, sectors, communities and societies that our research is trying to understand and shape. My time working as an activist has really influenced my desire as an academic to produce impactful research. I am a better academic because of it.

Ideally, whom would you want to find waiting for a meeting with you outside your office next Monday?

The Prime Minister, finally asking for advice on how to tackle gender inequality with better legislation! Or Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her writing is so eloquent and I am sure she would have plenty of incredible stories to share over coffee that speak to questions of women’s rights, corruption, equality, justice and the global South.

What are you working on currently? What may we anticipate in the near future?

In addition to finalising my book, I am leading a 2025-2027 project funded by the Australian Research Council to conduct a global comparative study of gender auditing in parliaments. I am really excited to be working with Prof. Kim Rubenstein and Prof. Jacqueline Mowbray to compare parliamentary auditing from a gender perspective in Australia, Canada and Spain. Comparative research is really undervalued and yet we can learn so much by looking beyond our own borders.

Thank you very much, Prof. Vijeyarasa, for participating in our symposium and for having taken the time to respond to our questions!