Events

Vernacular Rights Cultures

Hosted by the Department of Gender Studies

Online Public Event

Speakers

Kimberly Hutchings

Kimberly Hutchings

Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University

Kalpana Wilson

Kalpana Wilson

Lecturer in Geography at Birkbeck University

John Chalcraft

John Chalcraft

Professor of Middle East History and Politics in the Department of Government, LSE

Leticia Sabsay

Leticia Sabsay

Associate Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE

Chair

Anne Phillips

Anne Phillips

Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, Department of Government, LSE

In this panel, scholars Anne Phillips, Kimberly Hutchings, Kalpana Wilson, John Chalcraft, and Leticia Sabsay will discuss Professor Sumi Madhok’s new book, Vernacular Rights Cultures.

This book offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of worldmaking that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights, in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilisations in 'most of the world'. Vernacular Rights Cultures demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights.

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her most recent book is titled: Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (2021). She is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Gender, Developmentalism and Rights (2013) and the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013), and The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).

Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science in the Government Department at LSE. She is a political theorist, whose work is shaped by feminism, and engages across a range of equality issues. Her latest work, Unconditional Equals, is published by Princeton University Press in October 2021.

Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University, London. She specialises in the fields of political and international theory, feminist thought, global ethics and the political theory of violence. Her books include: Kant, Critique and Politics (1996), Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (2003), Time and World Politics (2008), Global Ethics (2nd Edition, 2018) and Violence and Political Theory (with Elizabeth Frazer, 2020). She is currently co-investigator on the Leverhulme funded project, Women and the History of International Thought.

Kalpana Wilson is a Lecturer in Geography at Birkbeck University of London, and her research explores questions of race/gender, labour, neoliberalism, and reproductive rights and justice, with a particular focus on South Asia and its diasporas. She is the author of ‘Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice’ (Zed Books, 2012) and has published widely on race, gender, international development, women’s agency and rural labour movements.

John Chalcraft is Professor of Middle East History and Politics in the Department of Government at the LSE. He has received his doctorate with distinction in the modern history of the Middle East from New York University. He has authored several books, including Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories (SUNY Press 2012)

Leticia Sabsay is Associate Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture at LSE Gender. Her work interrogates the entanglement between sexuality, subjectivity and political ideals of freedom and justice as processes of cultural translation, both across disciplines and transnational contexts. She has authored several books, including The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom (Palgrave 2016), co-edited Vulnerability in Resistance (Duke University Press 2016). She also co-edits the book series ‘Thinking Gender in Transnational Times’ for Palgrave Macmillan, and the book series ‘Critical South,’ for Polity Press.

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