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Dr Robin Redhead

Course Director

Dr Robin Redhead is Course Director in Politics and International Relations. She specialises in using co-production methods to bring survivors voices into policymaking environments in the field of human rights/human trafficking. She has developed partnerships in East Africa.

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Robin Redhead

About

Dr Robin Redhead is Course Director in Politics and International Relations. She specialises in using co-production methods to bring survivors voices into policymaking environments in the field of human rights/human trafficking. She has developed partnerships in East Africa.

Dr Robin Redhead is Course Director in Politics and International Relations. She specialises in using co-production methods to bring survivors voices into policymaking environments in the field of human rights/human trafficking. She has developed partnerships in East Africa.

Dr Redhead researches the politics of human rights, focusing on how people empower themselves through rights discourses. She specialises in using co-production methods to bring survivors' voices into policymaking environments in the field of human trafficking and modern slavery. With a focus on East Africa, Robin works with partners such as Haart Kenya https://haartkenya.org/ to build advocacy skills with survivors of human trafficking. She has an MA in Women Studies and Feminist Research and a PhD in Human Rights, both from the University of Manchester.

With a background in gender studies, Robin has focused on how women are constructed within the legal frameworks of international human rights. She is interested in identity construction and the implications this has for empowering people. Within human trafficking and modern slavery her research explores the narratives around perpetrator, victim and survivor to expose the complex web of subjectivities occupied by people with experience of exploitation. In the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Robin leads the 'Survivor Voices' theme, within the Lives and Voices Programme: Rebalancing and Empowering Communities. The theme brings interdisciplinary researchers together who examine how research contributes to including survivors in understanding the problem, identifying solutions and creating effective policy. The researchers and civil society work together using participatory methods and co-design to create materials that give voice to survivors.

Robin teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the politics of human rights, gendering the international, global policymaking and research design. She welcomes inquiries from PhD students researching human rights, human trafficking and modern slavery, and feminist international politics.

Academic positions

  • Lecturer
    University of Manchester, Politics, United Kingdom | 05 November 2014 - 30 August 2009

  • Lecturer
    Kingston University, United Kingdom | 31 August 2009 - 01 August 2013

Degrees

  • PG Certificate Teaching and Learning in HE
    Kingston University, United Kingdom

  • PhD
    University of Manchester, United Kingdom

  • MA Women's Studies and Feminist Research
    University of Manchester, United Kingdom

  • BA (Hons)
    York University, Canada

Languages

  • French
    Can read, speak and understand

Research interests

Dr Redhead's publications critique policymaking practices over a wide range of contexts that exclude marginalised voices. She has explored women's experience of gender-based violence, indigenous people's experience of state violence in Canada, children's rights during COVID-19, civilian peacekeepers, human rights practitioners and most recently survivors of human trafficking. Drawing on data from practice, her work explores how legal narratives impede the ability of marginalised groups to control how they are represented in legal frameworks and therefore how they are treated within protection processes. She is most interested in survivor-centred methodologies that promote best practice protection. When survivors' engagement with protection processes it limited, it creates implementation gaps. This results in further marginalisation and a reluctance for survivors to participate.

Working with partners in East Africa, Robin's work includes capacity-building through participatory methodologies in community-led research, supporting the voices and narratives of human trafficking survivors to influence policy.

Robin's inclusive co-produced research empowers marginalised people to build advocacy skills and bring their voices into decision making environments.

Publications (11)

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Chapter

2. Liberalism

Featured 25 May 2017 Political Ideologies Oxford University Press
AuthorsRedhead R, Hood S

This chapter explores the basic assumptions of liberal ideology. It first traces the origins of liberalism before discussing some key concepts and values of a liberal ideology such as liberty, democracy, rights, and tolerance. It then considers two of the most important, yet contrasting, strands within liberalism: economic liberalism, which supports policies of privatization and laissez-faire economics, and social liberalism, whose concern for individual freedom is coupled with a commitment to social equality. The chapter also looks at some key criticisms of liberal ideas, focusing on the liberal vision of a just society, as well as the influence of liberalism on social movements and political parties in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world. Finally, it illustrates the pervasiveness of liberalism and how it is related to other ideologies.

Journal article

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

Featured June 2007 International Feminist Journal of Politics9(2):218-238 Informa UK Limited

The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign 'Stop Violence against Women'. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders. © 2007 Taylor & Francis.

Journal article

Beyond ‘rights-based approaches’? Employing a process and outcomes framework

Featured 28 May 2019 International Journal of Human Rights23(5):699-718 Informa UK Limited
AuthorsMiller H, Redhead R

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The protection and promotion of human rights is experiencing increased commitment around the globe. Many organisations, groups and movements have strategically employed ‘rights-based’ agendas in order to advance issues and accomplish particular objectives. However, despite this ongoing mainstreaming and dominance, there is little time to reflect on the efficacy, sustainability and shortcomings of taking rights-based approaches. In this introduction to the volume ‘Beyond ‘rights-based approaches’?’ we think critically about – and beyond – ‘rights-based’ approaches. As part of our review of the existing literatures (which we organise around three key waves in rights-based focused research), we introduce new research that seeks transformative solutions to systemic patterns of injustice, while considering the real changes in peoples’ lives. Central to our discussion is the proposal and then the deployment of a new framework, based on a ‘process/ outcome axis’. From this vantage point we identify and discuss how our contributors challenge the prevailing assumptions and practices in the fight for human dignity, by addressing the gap between theory and practice, and between scholars, activists and practitioners.

Book

Exercising Human Rights: Gender, Agency, Practice

Featured 25 September 2014 186 Routledge

Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights. Using an innovative visual methodology, Redhead shines a new critical light on human rights campaigns in practice. She examines two cases in-depth. First, she shows how Amnesty International depicts women negatively in their 2004 ‘Stop Violence against Women Campaign’, revealing the political implications of how images deny women their agency because violence is gendered. She also analyses the Oka conflict between indigenous people and the Canadian state. She explains how the Canadian state defined the Mohawk people in such a way as to deny their human subjectivity. By looking at how the Mohawk used visual media to communicate their plight beyond state boundaries, she delves into the disjuncture between state sovereignty and human rights. This book is useful for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.

Journal article
Framing children’s lives through policy and public sphere debates on COVID-19: unequal power and unintended consequences
Featured 23 May 2021 Critical Policy Studies15(2):146-154 Informa UK Limited
AuthorsFattore T, Redhead R, Turnbull N

In this paper we analyze five dominant policy frames adopted by governments in their responses to children during the COVID-19 pandemic–the institutional, developmental, pathological, normative family and rights-excluding frames. We argue that these frames serve to meet the interests of non-child stakeholders in politically expedient ways, rather than addressing the needs of children and their families. We provide some suggestions for alternative policy approaches that take into account the interests of children, including understanding the ambivalent implications of lockdown, taking into account the social ecologies of children, and a renewed focus on children’s rights, most importantly children’s participation rights.

Journal article

Towards a Study of Human Rights Practitioners

Featured June 2011 Human Rights Review12(2):173-189 Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AuthorsRedhead R, Turnbull N

The expansion of human rights provisions has produced an increasing number of human rights practitioners and delineated human rights as a field of its own. Questions of who is practicing human rights and how they practice it have become important. This paper considers the question of human rights practice and the agency of practitioners, arguing that practice should not be conceived as the application of philosophy, but instead approached from a sociological point of view. Whatever the structuring effect of political institutions, human rights is being defined more expansively by practitioners. The weakness of international institutions and the interpretive scope of human rights discourse produce significant opportunity for practitioners to interpret the meaning of human rights. Our exploratory interviews of a small sample of practitioners reveal widely varying histories, in which they interpret their own work as "human rights" practice in differing ways. Practitioners who in the past thought of themselves differently, now identify as human rights activists. They are also becoming more professional, but concerned about professionalization. Their self-interpretations reflect these concerns and also respond to the necessities of career events. Through the conscious and unconscious aspects of their practice, practitioners exercise considerable agency in adapting human rights discourse to their own concerns while also being critical of it. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Journal article

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency: Visual Representation in Amnesty International's 2004 Campaign 'Stop Violence Against Women'

Featured June 2007 International Feminist Journal of Politics9(2):218-238
Chapter

Liberalism

Featured 25 May 2017 Political Ideologies Oxford University Press
AuthorsRedhead R, Hood S

A unique "stop and think" feature calls for readers to reflect on their own ideological beliefs.Online Resources:Political Ideologies is accompanied by comprehensive online resources, to support political ideology courses.For students: * ...

Chapter

From expert to experiential knowledge: exploring the inclusion of local experiences in understanding violence in conflict

Featured 30 May 2021 Feminist Interventions in Critical Peace and Conflict Studies Routledge
AuthorsAuthors: Redhead R, Bliesemann de Guevara B, Julian R, Editors: Maria O, McLeod L

This book provides a feminist intervention in Peace & Conflict Studies. It demonstrates why feminist approaches matter to theories and practices of resolving conflict and building peace.

Journal article
From Expert to Experiential Knowledge: Exploring the Inclusion of Local Experiences in Understanding Violence in Conflict
Featured 08 April 2019 Peacebuilding7(2):210-225 Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
AuthorsJulian R, Bliesemann de Guevara B, Redhead R

Critical peace and conflict scholars argue that to understand fully conflict dynamics and possibilities for peace research should incorporate ‘the local’. Yet this important conceptual shift is bound by western concepts, while empirical explorations of ‘the local’ privilege outside experts over mechanisms for inclusion. This article explores how an epistemology drawing on feminist approaches to conflict analysis can help to redirect the focus from expert to experiential knowledge, thereby also demonstrating the limits of expert knowledge production on ‘the local’. In order to illustrate our arguments and suggest concrete methods of putting them into research practice, we draw on experiences of the ‘Raising Silent Voices’ project in Myanmar, which relied on feminist and arts-based methods to explore the experiential knowledge of ordinary people living amidst violent conflict in Rakhine and Kachin states.

Book
10 years of Countering Human Trafficking in Kenya
Featured 12 September 2022 Julian R, Malinowski R, Redhead R120 Leeds Leeds Beckett
AuthorsEditors: Julian R, Malinowski R, Redhead R

10 Years of Countering Human Trafficking in Kenya: 2010-2020 is a publication that assesses the progress of Kenya's Counter Trafficking in Persons Act from 2010 to 2020. The publication includes research articles, interviews, a speech, and art. It is organized into four areas of action: prevention, protection, prosecution, and partnership.

Current teaching

  • Politics of Human Rights
  • Gendering the International
  • Global Policymaking: Environment and Human Rights
  • Dissertation and Research Design

PhD Supervisions:
Sureyya Sonmez Efe: The impact of 2008 Global Economic Crisis on regional labour markets and labour rights -as a part of Human Rights. The focus of the research is on citizenship and rights of migrant workers in Turkey after the Global Economic Crisis (completed).

Sarah Waite: Do aspects of regime and practice create and foster strong staff-prisoner relationships in women's prisons?

Teaching Activities (1)

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Course developed

Politics, Ethics & Justice

01 September 2017

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Dr Robin Redhead
17824
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