Kristi Heather Kenyon

Kristi Heather Kenyon is an associate professor in the human rights programme at the University of Winnipeg's Global College. With an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa, her research focuses on health and human rights, examining how and why civil society groups mobilise on stigmatised conditions and populations, and how health and human rights are understood in social and cultural context.
Her 2017 book Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy (McGill-Queens University Press) interrogates why, when and how NGOS use human rights in HIV advocacy.
Prior to her current appointment, she held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University and a Centre for Human Rights postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pretoria. She completed her PhD in political science at the University of British Columbia supported by the Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC.
Her research is informed by more than 15 years of work in, with and on civil society, including work as a human rights practitioner in southern Africa and southeast Asia and service on the board of local and international development organisations in Canada and Botswana.
She was a 2017-2019 CIFAR-Azrieli Global Scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and is a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Security and Development at Dalhousie University.