Erika Jiménez is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Law on a project entitled: Golani youth, human rights and the forgotten occupation. Her project aims to explore the views of Golani youth on the occupation and the usefulness of human rights discourse in their struggle against it. It also seeks to compare youth’s perspectives with those of older Golani generations and those of their Palestinian peers in the occupied West Bank (drawing on her previous research).

Erika is interested in conducting research that amplifies voices and ‘ways of knowing’ that are often side-lined in society and academia. She has experience of conducting children’s rights-based and participatory research including working along research advisory groups made up of minoritised populations.

Erika joined Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 2021 as a Research Fellow at SSESW on a Nuffield-funded project, which explored the experiences of education among minority ethnic and migrant families in Northern Ireland. She previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham in the area of modern slavery research. She obtained her PhD at QUB which focused on Palestinian youth’s views and experiences of human rights and how these are shaped by what they learn through human rights education at school and their lived experiences outside school. This work has been transformed into a forthcoming monograph Rethinking human rights: critical insights from Palestinian youth as part of the Human Rights Law in Perspective (Hart/Bloomsbury) series.