Kristi Kenyon

About Kristi Kenyon

Dr. Kristi Kenyon is the Program Director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Winnipeg (Canada). Her research and teaching is informed by more than 20 years working in, on and with civil society organisations in Southern Africa, South East Asia and Canada in the areas of health and human rights. Her research examines the intersections between health and human rights and their social, cultural and political and legal contexts. She has a particular interest in the role that non-governmental organisations and social movements play in promoting, protecting, and interpreting human rights and health. Current projects include: a Canadian Institutes for Health Research-funded research on stigma and Lymphatic Filariasis in Ghana, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded research on gender, disability and development in South Africa, and research on the role of Vancouver’s Downtown Community Court (Canada) in promoting health and well-being. Dr. Kenyon is an alumnus of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research – Azrieli Global Scholar program, and a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Security and Development (Dalhousie University).

She is the author of Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy (McGill-Queens, 2017) which built on fieldwork conducted in Botswana, South Africa, Uganda, and Ghana. Prior to joining the University of Winnipeg, Dr. Kenyon held postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University (SSHRC) and in the Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). She earned a PhD in Political Science at the University of British Columbia where she was a Trudeau Scholar, and an MA in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex (UK) where she was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. Dr. Kenyon has worked as a human rights practitioner with the Amnesty International International Secretariat (London), the Asian Institute for Development Communication (Kuala Lumpur) and the Botswana Network on Ethics, Law and HIV/AIDS (Gaborone), and has served on the board of local and international development organizations in Canada and Botswana. She is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford Academic), a member of the Human Rights Cities Alliance Steering Committee (North America), and a member of the Executive of the International Studies Association’s Human Rights Section.