Jigna Kotecha

Jigna Kotecha is an independent journalist and gender rights researcher based in New York, covering gender, neoliberalism, human rights, social movements and performance of power. She is a graduate student in the Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Before moving to the U.S. in 2015, she worked for two and a half years in Chhattisgarh, an insurgency-hit state in India, researching and writing on custodial rapes and fake encounters in the mineral-rich region of Bastar.

In 2016, Jigna started interning at MADRE, a New York-based women’s rights organization, where she is researching on the topics of gender training in conflict and post-conflict regions of Colombia and Nicaragua. She is an inter-sectional feminist, who resists war, caste system, and laissez-faire capitalism. It was after the JAWS session on gun violence in America, she attended in New York, when she decided to become an integral part of the symposium.