Unit for Global Justice Researchers

Kirsten works across academic research, feminist practice, and legal and policy practice, and draws on her interdisciplinary training in law and social theory and her experience as a qualified solicitor. Kirsten was the principal investigator of the recently completed project, ‘The Gender of Justice’.

This European Research Council funded project analysed the prosecution of sexual violence in armed conflict through a case study of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kirsten is a member of the International Research Group on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict. She has recently completed a major study of sexual violence and international criminal justice, The Justice of Humans.

She has worked in a range of post-conflict countries (Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Nepal, Sri Lanka) on projects related to torture prevention, redress for gender-based violence and human rights education. These experiences have led her to become particularly concerned with questions of decoloniality, desubalternisation and southern approaches to feminist activism.

She is the author of two books: The Socio-Political Practice of Human Rights (Routledge 2016) and Racialised Gang Rape and the Reinforcement of Dominant Order: Discourses of Gender, Race and Nation (Routledge 2017).

Since 2012 Kiran’s work has been focused in Sri Lanka. She is the principal investigator on the British Academy funded project, ‘Building Critical, Democratic and Peaceful Communities in Post-War Sri Lanka: The Role of Traditional Arts and Ritual’. She also established the ‘New Social Imaginaries’ network in Sri Lanka in 2019, bringing together scholars, activists and artists and with others she runs the Sri Lankan Decolonial Summer School programme.

Ever since she has been working on post-war religious practices and community-building in Sri Lanka. She is a member of the British Academy funded project Building Critical, Democratic and Peaceful Communities in Post-War Sri Lanka: The Role of Traditional Arts and Ritual (PI Dr Kiran Grewal, Sociology). 

Her research areas include human rights, gender, queer theory and subaltern studies. She works as the Project Coordinator in Sri Lanka under Dr Kiran Grewal, Goldsmiths College and the Sri Lankan Academic Coordinator of the Asia Pacific Masters in Human Rights and Democratisation. 

She was a School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy (SSHP) doctoral scholarship holder and has also taught in the Department of Psycho-Social Studies at Birkbeck. In addition to this, Dr Banerjee holds an interdisciplinary MPhil degree in Social Sciences from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), an MA in Women’s Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai (recipient of the Institute Gold Medal and ‘Best Student’ awards), and a BA (Honours) in Sociology with Film Studies and Journalism from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta in India.

Previously, she was also affiliated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (India) as a Junior Research Fellow and then as a Senior Research Fellow. Her research areas are global political and social thought, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and modern South Asian historiography.

She is currently interested in exploring the historical and discursive conditions that make anti-racist, postcolonial and decolonial social movements around the world possible, and the historico-philosophical antecedents of ethnonationalist politics and political violence.

At Goldsmiths, Dr Banerjee will be pursuing her postdoctoral project on ‘Thinking Reproductive Politics and Racial Justice Together: Muslim Women’s Movement, Rights and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary India.’

Her research interests and publications are in the field of cultural and political theory dealing with the politics of witnessing, equality and solidarity, governance of life and culture of trauma, as well as emancipatory politics in the intersecting public spaces of cultural and knowledge production (critical pedagogies in art, academia and activism).

She is involved in various international interdisciplinary platforms concerned with common goods and transformative social change.

Her work follows a trauma-informed, intersectional approach with respect to both engagement with affected persons, communities and partners and the design and implementation of research, investigation and case-building. Her specialized interest lies in the strategic investigation and prosecution of sexual violence and the gendered commission of international crimes.

She previously worked for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Law Programme at Chatham House and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. Her Visiting Fellowship will examine intersectionality as a method to advance international justice.

She developed and hosted the podcast Africa Rights Talks, has lectured at various universities in England from 2011-2017, worked for international research institutions and organisations, and consulted for non-profit organisations in Africa, Asia and London on human rights issues including the development of policy and advocacy approaches.

Her research interests lie in the areas of peace and security, public international law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law and transnational crimes. 

She is the author of Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the work of Jean Améry and Imre Kértesz (Bloomsbury, 2010).

Recently she has co-edited Sentient Subjects: Post-humanist Perspectives on effect (Routledge, 2020) and Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched (Lexington Press, 2019).