Dr Christina Kenny

Biography

Dr Christina Kenny is a lecturer in Sociology. She works on issues of gender, human rights and development with a focus on colonial histories, gendered citizenship, and gender and sexuality rights in the Global South. Her forthcoming monograph with the specialist academic publisher, James Currey (Oxford), 'Reimagining the Gendered Nation: Human Rights and Citizenship in Post-colonial Kenya', is grounded in field work, 2012 - 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019. Using Kenyan women’s gender and citizenship rights as a focal point, her thesis argues that human rights discourse creates particular kinds of recipients of rights, and often compels these subjects to inhabit their new, human rights based identities in limiting and problematic ways.

Christina has also worked with a variety of human rights based organisations in research, policy development and advocacy in Australia and sub-Saharan Africa including the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Migration and Refugee Review Tribunals, The Australian Govt. Department of the Attorney General; the Women’s Legal Centre (Cape Town) and the South African Human Rights Commission; the British Institute of Eastern Africa, the Network of African National Human Rights Institutions, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission in Nairobi.