Dr. Kristi Kenyon is the Program Director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Winnipeg (Canada). Her research and teaching is informed by more than 20 years working in, on and with civil society organisations in Southern Africa, South East Asia and Canada in the areas of health and human rights. Her research examines the intersections between health and human rights and their social, cultural and political and legal contexts. She has a particular interest in the role that non-governmental organisations and social movements play in promoting, protecting, and interpreting human rights and health. Current projects include: a Canadian Institutes for Health Research-funded research on stigma and Lymphatic Filariasis in Ghana, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded research on gender, disability and development in South Africa, and research on the role of Vancouver's Downtown Community Court (Canada) in promoting health and well-being. Dr. Kenyon is an alumnus of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research – Azrieli Global Scholar program, and a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Security and Development (Dalhousie University). She is the author of Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy (McGill-Queens, 2017) which built on fieldwork conducted in Botswana, South Africa, Uganda, and Ghana.
Prior to joining the University of Winnipeg, Dr. Kenyon held postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University (SSHRC) and in the Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). She earned a PhD in Political Science at the University of British Columbia where she was a Trudeau Scholar, and an MA in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex (UK) where she was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. Dr. Kenyon has worked as a human rights practitioner with the Amnesty International International Secretariat (London), the Asian Institute for Development Communication (Kuala Lumpur) and the Botswana Network on Ethics, Law and HIV/AIDS (Gaborone), and has served on the board of local and international development organizations in Canada and Botswana. She is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford Academic), a member of the Human Rights Cities Alliance Steering Committee (North America), and a member of the Executive of the International Studies Association's Human Rights Section.
Disability, Ethnic discrimination or persecution, Gender-based violence/domestic violence, Healthcare access/health systems capacity, HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ, Mental illness, Political persecution, Religious discrimination or persecution, Government/state actor persecution, Safe internal relocation, Sexual abuse/assault, Specialized medical services, Violence against children/child abuse
My main areas of work are related to: civil society advocacy activism, health - specifically HIV and stigmatised conditions/disabilities, often intersecting with gender, poverty, race and sexuality.. I have also conducted work in San communities in the Kalahari and in relation to university student protests in South Africa. I am currently engaged with research looking at women with neurological disabilities in South Africa, and people (but predominantly rural women) with Lymphatic Filariasis in Ghana. The civil society focus means I do have knowledge around what types of activism are tolerated/permitted in different settings. In some specific areas I could also provide expertise in relation to Ghana (particularly in relation to Lymphatic Filariasis), and Canada - if you permit work on one's own country. I have done some Master's-level coursework and research on refugee law. I have not produced expert reports in this area as of yet.
Selected Publications
Books
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2017. Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press).
Journal Articles and Research Notes
Kenyon, Kristi Heather, Regiane Garcia, Ada Chukwudozie. 2024. “Client health is part of my job:” A Qualitative Study of Attitudes and Experiences of Legal Personnel in British Columbia’s Downtown Community Court.” Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being 9(2): 109-113. https://www.journalcswb.ca/index.php/cswb/article/view/372
Kwarteng, Alexander, Kristi Heather Kenyon, Samuel Opoku-Asiedu, Garcia A. Regiane, Priscilla Kini, Efiba Senkyire Kwarteng, and Emmanuel Kobla Atsu Amewu. 2024. “Knowledge and Perceptions of Lymphatic filariasis patients in selected hotspot endemic communities in southern Ghana” PLOS Global Public Health 3(10): e0002476. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0002476
Kenyon, Kristi Heather and Tshepo Madlingozi. 2022. "‘Rainbow is not the new black’: #FeesMustFall and the demythication of South Africa’s liberation narrative." Third World Quarterly 32(2): 494-512 DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2021.2014314.
Garcia, Regiane, Kristi Heather Kenyon, Claire Brolan, Juliana Coughlin and Daniel Guedes. 2019. “Court as a Health Intervention: A Qualitative Analysis of Vancouver’s Downtown Community Court and Goal 3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.” Globalization and Health 15(80). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0511-9.
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2019. “Health Advocacy on the Margins: Human Rights as a Tool for HIV prevention among LGBTI communities in Botswana.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 37(2-3): 257-273. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2019.1659503.
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2019. “Viewing International Concepts through Local Eyes: Activist Understandings of Human Rights in Botswana and South Africa.” International Journal of Human Rights 23(9): 1395-1421. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2019.1607276.
Kenyon, Kristi Heather and Regiane Garcia. 2016. “Exploring Human Rights-Based Activism as a Social Determinant of Health: Insights from Brazil and South Africa.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 8(2): 198-218.
Book Chapters
Kenyon, Kristi Heather and Saad Ahmad Khan. 2025 [forthcoming, February]. “Non-State Actors” in Human Rights in Canada and Internationally, ed. Christina Szurlej. (Toronto: Emond Publishing).
McMillan, Colleen, Alexander Kwarteng, Kristi Heather Kenyon and Mary Asirifi. 2023. “Transnational Research Contexts Examining Researcher Positionality - Understanding Self as a First Step to Transnational Research” in The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Participatory Inquiry, Eds. Meagan Call-Cummings, Melissa Hauber-Özer, and Giovanni Dazzo. (Abington-on-Thames, Oxfordshire: Routledge), 166-185. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-International-Handbook-of-Criti…;
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2023. “I want my name:” Autonomy, Protection and Attribution in Research Interviews with 'Vulnerable' Populations.” Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work. Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Maritza Felices-Luna, Christina Clark-Kazak, Shayna Plaut and Neil Bilotta. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), 132-149. https://www.ubcpress.ca/messy-ethics-in-human-rights-work
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2023. “Relishing the Roots: the Promise and Peril of Decentralizing Human Rights Discourse” in Human Rights at the Intersections, Eds. Anthony Tirado Chase, Huss Banai, Sofia Gruskin, Pardis Mahdavi. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic), 23-32. https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/human-rights-at-the-intersections-9781350… , Chapter DOI: 10.5040/9781350268692.0010
Kenyon, Kristi Heather, Juliana Coughlin* and David Bosc. 2021 “‘‘Born Free’: it’s cute, but it’s a lie”: #FeesMustFall and Youth Counter-Narratives of Continuity in South African History,” In Young People and Popular Culture in Africa. Ed Paul Ugor. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press) 352–384.
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2015. “Localizing the Global/Globalizing the Local: Reconciling Botho and Human Rights in Botswana,” in Social Practice of Human Rights, ed. Joel Pruce. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 101-120. (book reviewed in: Perspectives on Politics)
Kenyon, Kristi. 2012. “Reasons for Rights: A Qualitative Approach to Rights Use Among HIV Advocacy Groups,” in Beyond the law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights, ed. Frans Viljoen (Pretoria, South Africa: Pretoria University Law Press), 67- 94.