Book launch: Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl.

Ratna Kapur

Speaker Bio:

Ratna Kapur, Professor of International Law, Queen Mary University of London and Distinguished Visiting Professor, Symbiosis School of Law, Pune, India. She has written extensively on issues of human rights, with a specific focus on women’s rights, the rights of migrants, sex workers, and religious minorities. She has also written about various aspects of Indian Constitutional law in particular the politics of secularism, the right to religious freedom, and equality. Her current research interest is on developing a critique of freedom in human rights law and exploring other non-liberal emancipatory possibilities.

Discussants:

Brenda Cossman is Professor of Law and the Director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She joined the Faculty of Law in 1999, and became a full professor in 2000. She holds degrees in law from Harvard and the University of Toronto and an undergraduate degree from Queen's. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she was Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University.

Vanja Hamzić is a Senior Lecturer in Legal History and Legal Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He holds two First Class Honours degrees from the University of Sarajevo, an LLM with Distinction from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from King’s College London. He has worked as an activist and researcher with various international and civil society organisations in South and South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and West and South Africa. Before coming to SOAS, Dr Hamzić held academic posts at City, University of London and King’s College London.

Book blurb:

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights rests in turning away from liberal freedom ¬and towards non-liberal registers of freedom.