Current Research Projects

Book Project: Focus: Transforming Legal Rights: Inclusion for Transgender Persons

Overview: Legal Rights for transgender persons are needed, it is argued, for enabling their expressive freedom, empowering their bodily autonomy, and protecting their dignity. Legal rights for transpersons would contribute to their recognition and validation, as well as provide protection against invidious discrimination. Transrights have a crucial role to play in to ensure the liberty of conscientious resistance to inflexibly binary gender norms. Such rights should help o overcome challenges for transgender persons in their making, unmaking, and remaking of themselves. Other rights not specific to transpersons (also hard fought for and only recently won), offer social recognition and legal status for intimate associations of one’s choice, including same sex marriage. Some depictions of human rights promise still more for sexual minorities: emancipation, empowerment, and liberation. Whether and how legal rights can do all this, or should even be expected to do so, is the motivating inquiry for this book.

Book Chapters:

Recent Book Chapter Title: Contextualizing a Human Rights Perspective for Water Ethics: From Exploitation to Empowerment and Beyond

Abstract: Throughout policy discussions about water management, several familiar solutions to achieve security and sustainability are proposed: markets and states. Advocates of market environmentalism champion the use of market pricing and significant involvement of the private sector in water systems to achieve water conservation and efficiency. That perspective has affinity with Dublin Statement principles affirming the finitude and vulnerability of water and emphasizing that water should be recognized as an economic good. Critics warn that markets suffer from numerous and serious flaws. Left unregulated, markets generate externalities such as pollution and they fail to protect the interests of the most marginal and vulnerable. The decision making processes that are typical of markets neglect to ensure opportunities for participation in decision making by those most affected, communities and consumers. It is recommended here that the focus of water policy should not be on a simple binary: market or state, in isolation. Instead on a human rights perspective, the crucial consideration is where, when, and how the market and state should each play their respective roles in the pursuit of sustainability and water security. A human rights perspective offers us a shift in priorities, a way to reaffirm values and priorities that are obscured at best and disregarded at worst by market environmentalism. Core elements of human rights are reflected in other Dublin Statement principles advocating for a participatory approach to water management and incorporating a concern for equity and non-discrimination in access to water. This chapter suggests that we need human rights, and specifically the human rights to water and sanitation because we do not yet live in a socially just, ecologically sustainable world.

Published in Ethical Water Stewardship; Editors: Stefanovic, Ingrid, Adeel, Zafar (Springer, 2021) https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030495398