Thank you for having me! 

I started my career working on human rights based approaches to public policy, with the Australian Human Rights Commission and other agencies of the Australian public service, and the NGO sectors in Australia and South Africa. The more I worked with people and communities most affected (or targeted) by social welfare and social justice policy the more I became frustrated that local histories, experiences and knowledges were routinely ignored – a now well-established critique of state and INGO practice. 

I wanted to show that without a deep, grounded understanding of local histories and cultural dynamics, lasting change that reflected and promoted the priorities of the most vulnerable communities could never be achieved. I wanted to argue for critical and sustained attention be paid to regional and national academic, activist and intellectual movements and to centre them in my engagement with Kenyan gender politics and gender rights analysis. While international human rights programming has (or at least can be!) better at acknowledging cultural complexity and the nuance of operating in different political and cultural contexts, the book also argues for detailed and critical attention to history, and the historiographies that influence modern conceptions of nationhood, rights based claims around women’s rights, but also in relation to other critical identity and distribution questions, for example with regard to land, ethnicity and xenophobia, sexuality and gender identity and expression.