Speaker: Professor Sumi Madhok (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Chair: Professor Kieran McEvoy (Queen’s University Belfast)

This Lecture will introduce the concept of “anti-imperial epistemic justice”, an essential framework for understanding the politics of rights and human rights in the majority of societies worldwide. This framework is not only crucial for understanding rights politics, but also for promoting ethical and democratic approaches to knowledge production more broadly. Drawing on ethnographically informed theoretical research on rights politics, this lecture will highlight key intellectual tools for considering anti-imperial epistemic justice. These include critical interventions, shaped by non-idealist and pluralistic approaches to thinking.

About the Speaker

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Politics (LSE). She is also Faculty Associate at the LSE International Inequalities Institute. Her most recent book Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2021) received ‘The Susan Strange Best Book Prize’ and ‘The Sussex International Theory Prize, 2022’. It also received The International Studies Association’s Lee Ann Fujii Book Prize ‘Honorable Mention’. She is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); and the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).

About the Chair

Kieran McEvoy is the Senator George J. Mitchell Chair in Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute and a Professor of Law and Transitional Justice at Queens University Belfast.

He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2023-26) working on ways in which armed groups can be held accountable for past human rights violations and encouraged to apologise for and acknowledge those past harms. He has been working on issues related to the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland for over twenty years.

He has authored or co-authored four books, co-edited eight books or special issues and over seventy journal articles and scholarly book chapters.

He has been elected as Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

This Lecture is hosted in partnership with the British Academy and Queen’s University Belfast.

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