Vernacular rights cultures: The politics of origins, human rights and gendered struggle for justice

'Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggle for Justice' 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. 

Discussants

Dr Rafeef Ziadah from King's Department of International Development will join Professor Sumi Madhok to talk about the book.