[AIS Vision Job Talk] Professor Claire Charters
“Vision: Research and Teaching Relevance to Indigenous Studies within AIS at UCLA” and Q&A
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
3:00 pm
Zoom
Dr. Claire Charters will speak about her vision for her role within AIS is to bring unique and new perspectives, knowledge, energy and tools to AIS as a Māori legal academic, based on experiences in advocacy, research and teaching around the globe as well as in international and legal political processes. Like AIS, she sees the value of research in strengthening Indigenous peoples’ voice, sovereignty and self-determination –her motivation for entering academia– together with and led by Indigenous peoples. More specifically, Charters would contribute by expanding AIS research into:
- International law and politics, especially Indigenous peoples’ rights under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and their relevance domestically; and
- Indigenous peoples’ rights and colonial state law around the world, especially in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and expanding into the Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Claire Charters is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Auckland Faculty of Law where she teaches courses on Comparative Constitutional Law and Indigenous Peoples, Jurisprudence, Indigenous Peoples under International Law, and Contemporary Tiriti o Waititangi Issues. According to Charters, her primary area of research focuses on “Indigenous peoples’ rights in international and constitutional law, with a comparative focus.” Her project here is not only to deploy existing international doctrine and legal processes to address various dimensions of Indigenous marginalization, and to shore up claims of Indigenous sovereignty, but also to demonstrate the ways in which various sources of Indigenous knowledge has been productively shaping the international legal order.
Charters has served as a Trustee on the UN Voluntary Fund for Indigenous People and was appointed by the President of United Nations General Assembly to advise him on enhancing Indigenous people’s participation in the United Nations. She is the Editor of te Ta Harur, Journal of Maori Legal Issues, was a Fox Fellow at Yale University, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (Centre for the Study of Human Rights) and is the recipient of the Royal Society Rutherford Discovery Fellowship.
Charles received her LLB (Honors) (First Class) from the University of Otoga, Dunedin, New Zealand, an LLM from NYU, and a PhD from Cambridge.