Reimagining Rights
Voicescape
An upcoming Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (MSCA) at the University of Antwerp (2026-2028), exploring how stateless and displaced women in Kathmandu voice rights and belonging from the margins.
What is Voicescape?
What will Voicescape do?
Explore how stateless and/or displaced women claim their rights through everyday forms of activism and collective action.
I will ask how do these practices unsettle dominant ideas of rights and belonging?
How do they give rise to alternative imaginaries for rights and law?
Finally, what do rights mean for stateless women?
Why does it matter?
Praxis emerges in spaces where reflection, action, and collective struggle meet.
This means challenging extractive research and state-centred ideas of rights and taking seriously the knowledge, strategies, and imaginations of those most often excluded.
Future Plans for Reimagining Rights
Reimagining Rights Praxis Hub (ReRights) - a vision for the future
ReRights is a future initiative I am developing with Maria Reclade Vela. We both have an interest in developing praxis-based approaches to law. We met through the EDOLAD programme, a European joint doctoral programme in law and development in the Netherlands. The programme brought together researchers who work on questions of law, rights, and social change. Our shared experience in EDOLAD shaped our commitment to creating a space where we approach rights through lived experience and critical reflection.
The ideas behind ReRights were built from my doctoral research in Malaysia, where I asked about the voices of refugees and stateless persons as community development actors (as change-makers).
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ReRights
ReRights is not yet a registered organisation. We are building the foundations for a space that supports collaborative research and action. We believe that existing legal frameworks often fail to reflect the realities of people most affected by injustice. ReRights brings together communities, researchers, and practitioners to think differently about justice, belonging, and voice.
We will both contribute to ReRights through our own research with people from the margins and borders of society. We will build with communities the visions of what this organisation could become.
ReRights will be a praxis hub i.e. a space for imagination and action. We work with those excluded from dominant rights frameworks, not as subjects to be studied but as co-creators and co-researchers. Through participatory approaches to storytelling, policy, education, and research, ReRights will hopefully create some of the conditions needed to reimagine what rights can be.
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Reimagining is not about reform nor fixing nor adjusting something broken. It is about a fundamental shift in how we dream of, understand, and live in our world.
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Reimagining Rights Network (ReRiN)
The Reimagining Rights Network (ReRiN) is a proposed COST Action with Tilburg University as the main proposer. I initiated the network and led the development of the proposal, working closely with colleagues across Europe to shape its vision and direction. Over the summer and early autumn, I built partnerships, hosted two workshops, and brought together diverse perspectives to co-create the thematic focus. The proposal was first submitted in 2024, and has been resubmitted in October 2025 with over 20 partners across 11 countries.
ReRiN responds to the limits of dominant rights frameworks that remain tied to statehood, legal status, and citizenship. It centres lived experience and collective agency, asking how rights might be reimagined beyond formal systems. The network takes a transdisciplinary and participatory approach, creating space for researchers, practitioners, and rights-seeking communities to think differently about justice, belonging, and the ways rights are understood and enacted.
