This seminar event hosted by the Human Rights Centre will be explored by our guest speakers Sophie Kabangu and Dr Kojo Koram on current and emerging issues and challenges surrounding Black Lives Matter and Human Rights.

Speaker biographies

Sophie Kabangu

Sophie Kabangu, a Sociology and Human Rights Undergraduate student at the University of Essex. For the past year, Sophie has been part of Amnesty UK's Rise Up Programme bringing together young human rights defenders from across the country.

She will be addressing the ways in which BLM provide a means by which young people might become actively engaged with wider HRs issues and challenges. This includes exploring the question whether BLM provides a new model/method for political activism and what role might HRs norms play in this.

Dr Kojo Koram

Dr Kojo Koram is a Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. Prior to taking up this role, he was a Lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Essex between 2016-2018. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2011 and then received his PhD in 2017. In 2018, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities awarded his PhD the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.
Alongside his academic work, Kojo has also written for publications as varied as the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, the New Statesman and Critical Legal Thinking.

Dr. Kojo Koram will address the following issues: the relationship between identity politics and BLM; how decolonisation has historically sat in tension with the language of human rights; and the ways in which Black Lives Matter is a compliment and challenge to human rights-based discourses. 

Register for this online webinar on Zoom.