On 8 March 2019, Dr. John Reynolds will speak on the opening plenary panel of a major international conference on 'Critical Perspectives on Race and Human Rights: Transnational Re-Imaginings'. According to the conference organisers: 'Contemporary global and national political crises, many of which threaten the human rights of millions and even the international human rights system itself, bring into sharp relief enduring legacies of racial injustice and racial inequality all over the world. Yet substantive racial justice and equality seem marginal within contemporary global human rights legal scholarship, discourse, institutions, and even among the advocacy organizations that wield the greatest international influence on issues of human rights concern. Novel, radical ways of re-imagining the role of law and legal institutions in achieving racial justice and equality are urgent, and this conference will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars to consider the place of human rights in this larger context. It will explore critical perspectives on race and human rights from the joint perspectives of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
The conference is jointly convened by UCLA's Critical Race Studies Program, Promise Institute for Human Rights, International and Comparative Law Program and Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, and aims to foster a transnational, interdisciplinary academic inquiry among human rights, TWAIL and CRT scholars on some of the most pressing issues of our time. The conference programme is available here.
John Reynolds teaches international law, world trade law, and economic & social rights on the Department of Law's LLB and LLM programmes. He is the programme director of our LLM in International Justice.