Melbourne Law School
Thursday 29 November
Room 611, Level 6
1:00PM - 2:30PM
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About the book launch
The book will be launched by a panel as follows:
Daniela Alaattinoglu, Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Visiting Fellow MLS and PhD Candidate EUI;
Odette Mazel, PhD Candidate MLS;
Claerwen O’Hara, PhD Candidate MLS; and
Dianne Otto, Professorial Fellow MLS (Chair).
Join IILAH for a panel discussion with Professor Ratna Kapur and IILAH scholars on her new book: Gender Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Elgar, 2018).
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.
About the author
Ratna Kapur is currently a Visiting Professor at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London. Her regular position is as Distinguished Faculty, Symbiosis School of Law, India, and Senior Faculty, Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School.
She has written and published extensively on human rights, international law, and postcolonial and feminist legal theory. She has taught as a visiting faculty at a large number of universities around the world, including Yale Law School, Georgetown University Law Centre and the UN Peace University (Costa Rica). Her other books include Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties (Routledge, 2010), Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (Cavendish/Taylor & Francis, 2005) and Secularisms Last Sigh? (co-authored, Oxford University Press, reprint 2001).
