Dr Ruth Kelly
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Ruth Kelly is a lecturer in human rights, based in Politics and the Centre for Applied Human Rights. She convenes the Human Rights Workshop – an interdisciplinary space for thinking creatively, critically and politically about rights – and is a member of the advisory board of York’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Research Centre. She is currently Dean of Postgraduate Taught Students in the Department of Politics and International Relations. She also serves as Chair of the Board of Elect Her - a multi-partisan organisation working to motivate, support and equip women in all their diversity to stand for political office in Britain. 

Ruth’s research is on cultural politics, citizenship practices and political theory. Since 2016 she has been working with artists and activists from Bangladesh and Uganda to explore the links between storytelling and the arts, activism, and the political imagination. This has included work on the ethics of North-South research collaborations, in the context of epistemic injustice and colonial legacies. During that time she has also supported programmes of peer-learning for human rights leaders and activists at risk, and research on sustaining activism over time.

Before taking up her post at York, Ruth held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford, supporting the Symposium on Strength and Solidarity for Human Rights. She has also held a fellowship at Yale University and a lectureship in Politics at the University of Durham. She has a background in law and politics, with a PhD in Politics from York, an LLM from Cambridge and an LLB from Trinity College, Dublin.

She has previously served as Chair of the Electoral Reform Society, and worked with ActionAid, Oxfam, UNDP and the European Commission.

Research

Overview

Ruth’s current research looks at how people around the world engage with troubling cultural traditions to make sense of the world and negotiate political change. This draws on evidence from three interactive spaces – in Chittagong, Kampala and Dublin – where communities of artists and activists draw on familiar cultural traditions to facilitate challenging conversations about responsibility and belonging. 

She looks at cultural practices not just as data to inform theory, but as a mode of political thought, which people use to theorise about their life worlds and articulate normative proposals that political theorists can learn from. Together with others doing engaged theory, in taking this approach, she seeks to better align political theory with the questions, goals and needs of communities struggling for justice around the world.

This builds on her previous work on art, activism and the political imagination with colleagues in Bangladesh and Uganda. For example, she has carried out participatory and ethnographic research with writers and activists in Kampala to explore how deliberative engagement with myth can enable audacious claims and affirming negotiation, allowing participants to navigate the tension between their commitment to a given political community and their desire for that community to change. 

As part of this work, she is learning from activists about the ideas and habits that shape, motivate, and sometimes limit their work. She is particularly interested in how human rights and feminist activists sustain their activism and political engagement over time.

She also has interests in the ethics of North-South research collaborations, the political cultures of human rights and development work, the politics of language, and religious practice and human rights.

Projects

Previous projects

Art, activism and the archive (GCRF, 2019-20)

If heritage imaginaries shape and constrain political imaginations, can alternative cultural and political archives expand the scope of the political imagination?

In previous research, the team found that historical scripts about the future and development constrain the way that the future is imagined, whether by artists, academics or activists. In this project, Ruth worked with Shaela Sharmin and Shorab Jahan (Chittagong), Susan Kiguli (Makerere), and Emilie Flower (York) to convene a number of experimental activities held in York, Chittagong, and Kampala to explore, surface, disrupt and create alternative archives. These included, arts exchanges, archive training, artist residencies, creative labs, arts based workshops, public conversations, street happenings, exhibitions and artist responses. Notably, the project supported activities within the innovative Cheragi Art Show in Chittagong, and an exhibition in the Uganda National Museum in Kampala.

Creative activism: art and development alternatives (GCRF/AHRC, 2016-18)

In this project, Ruth worked with artist and researcher Emilie Flower to bring together groups of academics, artists and activists in Kampala and in Dhaka to explore how art could open space for the political imagination. We worked from the premise that imagination is not just something we have; it's something we generate together, through shared experiences, languages and ideas; through image, stories, dance, and music. Tapping into the rich cultural and artistic heritage of the places we come from, participants used art to experience the world differently and to dream up visions of a more just and sustainable world. Artists involved in the project created a series of artistic responses, which can be viewed online.

Supervision

Ruth is interested in supervising doctoral projects in any of these areas and has a particular interest in working with candidates with previous experience of working in the human rights, social justice and international development sectors.

Publications

Selected publications

• R Kelly, 'Re-membering Red Riding Hood: situated solidarities between Ireland and Uganda' (2023) Feminist Theory 24(2), 208-226. doi:10.1177/14647001211043996
• R Kelly, 'Translating rights and articulating alternatives: rights-based approaches in ActionAid’s work on unpaid care' (2019) International Journal of Human Rights 23 (862) 
• E Flower and R Kelly, 'Researching like an artist: disrupting participatory arts-based methods in Uganda and Bangladesh' in P Cooke and I Souria-Turner (eds), Participatory arts in international development (Routledge 2019)