Malia Lee Womack

Dr. Malia Lee Womack earned a BA from UC Berkeley in Gender and Women’s Studies with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice, an MA from Columbia University in Human Rights Studies, and an MA in Latin American Studies as well as a PhD in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University. 

 Womack critically analyzes human rights transnational and global initiatives to expose imperialism and hegemonies, and to advocate for revised activist strategies that cultivate and nurture cultural diversity, grassroots organizing, and insight as well as action from communities in regards to their empowerment.  Womack investigates intersectionality, exposes historically formed global and transnational power structures and structural violences, and considers how communities she researches have been impacted by colonialism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization.

 Womack also questions in what ways do international human rights frameworks reinforce global power structures/inequalities? How can international human rights be restructured to be more inclusive and accessible to all human beings? Her pedagogies pinpoint how the human rights system should be redesigned to focus on complex intersectional identities (rather than being based on simplistic universalized identity traits). She applies an intersectional feminist analysis to universal human rights to interrogate the shortcomings in the current human rights system’s design and to advocate for an improved design based on a more inclusive and robust vision of human rights. 

Womack practices critical human rights pedagogies to challenge the field of human right’s normative discourses and policies, and to advocate for revisions that take into account globalized power inequalities and the diverse and complex needs of marginalized communities and individuals. She exposes how elite groups have unbalanced power to shape the conceptualization of and implementation of human rights, and thus the framing of group identities and the human identity.  Womack examines the barriers to universalizing rights because although grouping people under collective identity rubrics can be empowering because this practice allows individuals to join in activism by locating commonalities among each other, the practice is embedded with a spectrum of power hierarchies, frames identities in restrictive terms which excludes and marginalizes people, and avoids thinking critically about intersectionality and the complexity of identities.