Abstract:
At least two things are self evident: Human rights have become the predominant conceptual language of modernity, and around the globe, one is witnessing multitudinous struggles over rights and human rights. But, how useful is the human rights framework and ‘global human rights’ scholarship for thinking about the stakes and struggles over rights and human rights, and, more importantly, how do we conceptually capture rights struggles in what Partha Chatterjee has called ‘most of the world’? In order to conceptually capture the ethical dynamism, ideational energy and intellectual innovativeness of this language and activism around rights, I argue that we need yet more complex and different kinds of thinking. I propose the framework of vernacular rights cultures to theorise and empirically document the rights politics in ‘most of the world’. Through ethnographically tracking ‘vernacular rights cultures’ mobilised around grassroots citizen movements in South Asia, I will argue that this a key epistemic and political project in thinking about human rights politics and one consisting of a two fold challenge: to produce scholarship that will produce a shift in the epistemic centre of human rights, and to generate conceptual work supportive of those involved in challenging complex inequalities and the intersectional nature of oppression at the frontline.

Article: 'On vernacular rights cultures and the political imaginaries of haq'
Madhok, Sumi (2017) On vernacular rights cultures and the political imaginaries of haq. Humanity: an International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 8:3 ( Winter). ISSN 2151-4364 (In Press)

Sumi Madhok is Associate Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. She is the author of ‘Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights’ (2013); the coeditor of ‘Gender, Agency and Coercion’ ( 2013) and of the ‘Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory' (2014). Currently, she is completing a monograph on decolonising human rights titled: 'vernacular rights cultures, gender and citizenship in South Asia'. Trained as a feminist political theorist, Dr Madhok’s research lies at the intersection of feminist political theory and philosophy, gender theories, transnational activism, rights/human rights, citizenship, postcoloniality, feminist ethnographies and developmentalism. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes including from the ESRC, The Mellon Foundation, The British Academy and the Ford Foundation. During 2015-16 she held the Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and in May 2017, she received LSE Student's Union Teaching Excellence Award for 'Inspirational Teaching'.