Professor Kimberley Brownlee

Early Career Fellow 2014

No Entry: The Evils of Social Deprivation

Debates about human rights neglect social rights. By ‘social rights’, I do not mean economic rights, such as basic subsistence, health, and education, which have received considerable attention. By ‘social rights’, I mean the rights that protect our fundamental interpersonal, associative, and community-membership needs irrespective of our economic circumstances. The project aims to remedy the neglect of these social needs by exploring 1) the theoretical and practical credentials of social human rights, and 2) the ethics and politics of sociability in acknowledging such rights. The project aims to show that we have more reason to attend to each other’s interpersonal needs than liberal thinking tends to recognise.

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Biography

Kimberley Brownlee holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her current work focuses on loneliness, belonging, social human rights, and freedom of association. Her past work focused on civil disobedience, punishment, and restorative justice. She is the author of Being Sure of Each Other (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012). Prior to her appointment at UBC, she was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She has held numerous visiting positions including a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford (2019-20); a Visiting Fellowship at the Australian National University (2019), a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Vanderbilt University (2008); an HLA Hart Visiting Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford (2009); a CEPPA Visiting Research Fellowship at St Andrews University (2009); and a Warwick-Monash Visiting Fellowship at Monash University (2015). She is the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2012), and has served on the executive committees of the Aristotelian Society (2014-2017), the British Philosophical Association (2012-2016), and the Society for Applied Philosophy (2007-2013).

Biographical details correct as of 06.02.25

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