Friday in Focus: Farrah Raza

by | May 31, 2018

My time at Oxford began in 2017, when I joined as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Public Law at Pembroke College. I teach Constitutional Law to first year undergraduates at Pembroke and Administrative Law to second year undergraduates at Pembroke, Merton and Somerville. It’s been enjoyable to teach a mix of students and to be involved in the admissions interviews. Pembroke College itself has a very friendly and supportive environment.

Alongside teaching, I have been developing my research projects. My PhD thesis focuses on the issue of religious accommodation, and in particular, on the limits of such accommodation in the context of liberal secular states. To that end, I am interested in conceptions of secularism and theories of liberalism. In particular, I draw on Joseph Raz’s reformulation of the harm principle as the normative foundation of my model of religious accommodation. I adopt a policy-orientated approach geared towards managing religious claims. My PhD was funded by the Centre of European Law, King’s College London. I also completed a research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, which was very beneficial for developing a comparative methodology.

I joined the Oxford Human Rights Hub in 2017. The OXHRH has been an important part of my experience at Oxford. It’s been really useful to present my work at the Hub and to engage with scholars from around the world, who also actively work on pressing human rights issues. I am currently a co-editor of the Oxford Human Rights Blog. The Blog allows human rights lawyers, policy makers and activists to keep abreast of global human rights developments.

Prior to coming to Oxford, I was a teaching fellow on the Public Law and Legal Systems of Africa & Asia courses at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where I also delivered the lectures on the Human Rights Act 1998. I also taught on the Public Law and Anti-discrimination Law courses at King’s College London. My research interests include legal theory, constitutional and administrative law, human rights law and religious freedom. Working at Oxford University has been wonderful because of the resources, events and the thriving intellectual community here.

 

 

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