Affiliated Faculty at CIHR

Jean Carmalt is a human rights lawyer who studies the way socio-legal and geographic theories relate to public international law. She specializes in analyzing the spatial dimension of injustice as it relates to remedies, natural hazards, and economic and social rights. Her work includes specific case studies about the way injustice gets built into urban landscapes and theoretical interventions focused on the way universal norms relate to local practices, care ethics, and everyday life. She created an interdisciplinary framework of analysis called "critical geographies of human rights" that incorporates socio-legal, geographic, and international legal dimensions, which is detailed in her 2018 article on Myanmar. Carmalt also has experience as a human rights advocate, first at Human Rights First as part of the team working on International Criminal Court negotiations and then at the Center for Economic and Social Rights as a legal coordinator. Her most recent work focuses on participatory research processes in relation to economic and social rights violations in urban environments.