Organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law

Date: Friday, November 13
Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM
Location: Online/Zoom

Event Details | RSVP for Zoom link

Ratna Kapur, a Professor of International Law at Queen Mary University of London, will be discussing her book “Gender, Alterity, and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl.” The book is about the possibility of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights. Kapur interrogates human rights as a project of freedom through a critical evaluation and analysis of scholarship and advocacy on LGBT rights, campaigns against violence against women, and gender equality interventions in the context of the Islamic veil bans in Europe. Kapur illustrates how human rights emerge as a governance and regulatory endeavour in relation to gender and alterity, and how more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities have not necessarily produced more freedom for these constituencies. In response to what happens when the faith in human rights as a liberal freedom project is so substantively eroded, she provocatively argues in favor of exploring non-liberal approaches to freedom and the futurity of human rights within such a pursuit.