Tomas Martin will defend his PhD thesis: Embracing Human Rights - Governance and Transition in Ugandan Prisons
Review Committee:
Associate Professor Eric K. Hahonou, RU (chairman of the committee)
Professor Anne Griffiths, University of Edinburgh
Senior Researcher Julie Hornberger, African Centre for Migration and Society, Johannesburg.
Supervisor:
Professor Christian Lund, KU
Resume: The thesis explores human rights and their relationship with governance and transition through a study of the Ugandan Prisons Service and examines how human rights are embraced by the powerful state institutions that they are supposed to regulate. Based on a seven-month fieldwork, the thesis offers an ethnographic analysis of everyday practices of prison staff and demonstrates how abstract global (contested) discourses on human rights are translated into practice. The thesis shows how human rights reform is being forcefully exported into Ugandan prisons, but human rights are significantly localised in the process through the agency of prison officers, who appropriate human rights talk, law and technologies and put them to local use.
Professor Lisa Richey will lead the defense
ISG will host a reception afterwards.