Christina Kenny

I am a lecturer in Sociology at the University of New England. I work 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. I have worked with a variety of human rights based organisations in research and policy development in Australia, Kenya and South 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, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission.

My forthcoming monograph, 'Reimagining the Gendered Nation: Human Rights and Citizenship in Post-colonial Kenya' (James Currey, November, 2022), is grounded in field work, 2012 - 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019. Using Kenyan women’s gender and citizenship rights as a focal point, I argue 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.

I am currently working on projects that explore the experiences of people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression working in agrifood supply chains in Kenya and Samoa funded by the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research and the Australian Academy of the Humanities through the David Phillips Travelling Fellowship.

PhD (ANU), BA (Hons I); LLB (USyd), Grad Dip (Legal Practice)(ANU), admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of NSW.