Shaimaa Abdelkarim

Dr Shaimaa Abdelkarim

Small Group Project 2026

Brick-by-Brick, Wall-by-Wall: Co-Producing Transnational Feminist Abolitionist Knowledges

With molly ackhurst & Silvana Tapia Tapia

Since the 2010s, global uprisings against authoritarianism, corruption, and coercive overreach (e.g., the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, End SARS) have brought discussions on prison and police abolition into mainstream social justice agendas. These debates are crucial to address militarisation, carceral violence, and totalitarianism worldwide, and include feminist perspectives on abolition and anti-carceral justice across the global North and South. However, limited resources to cross geographical and language barriers have hindered the formation of transnational networks. Making abolitionist approaches to justice understandable and imaginable to the public is also a key collective challenge. Additionally, collaboration among academics, activists and grassroots organisers is infrequent and largely confined to the global North. Therefore, establishing a South-North forum for knowledge exchange is vital.

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Areas of interest

Postcolonialism Legal Theory Critical Race Studies Race Human Rights Colonialism Resistance

Cohort

FG11

Biography

Dr Shaimaa Abdelkarim is an Assistant Professor in postcolonial legal theory and critical race studies. She is a multidisciplinary researcher whose teaching and research are informed by a psycho-social approach to human rights discourse. She works on questions of colonialism, resistance, and human rights.

Shaimaa Abdelkarim joined Birmingham Law School as a lecturer in postcolonial legal theory and critical race studies in the fall of 2021. Prior to that, she was a researcher at the Center of Research and Studies at the Hague Academy of International law (2020-2021). In 2019, she was awarded a Kathleen Fitzpatrick visiting fellowship for the Laureate Program in International Law at Melbourne Law School. She also held a visiting research fellowship at Warwick Law School.

Shaimaa has been an active member of various research networks including TWAIL (Third World Approach to International Law) and IGLP (Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School). She speaks regularly at different conferences like that of London Conference in Critical Thought, Critical Legal Conference and SLSA (Society for Legal Scholars Association) and gives invited talks at several institutions such as the Laureate Program Seminar at Melbourne Law School (2019) and the Global Institute of Law (2021).

Shaimaa completed her PhD in 2021 at the School of Law, University of Leicester. Her doctoral thesis analyses the conception of resistance in human rights discourse. During her PhD, she taught on the Analysing Legal Concepts and Law, Justice, and Society modules at University of Leicester. She holds an LLM from the Law Department at the American University in Cairo and an LLB from Cairo University.

Biographical details correct as of 26.06.25