Erika Jiménez is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Law, leading a project entitled: Golani youth, human rights and the forgotten occupation. Her project explores the views of Golani youth on life in the occupied Golan and the usefulness of human rights discourse in their struggles against the injustices they face. It also compares youth’s perspectives with those of older Golani generations and those of their Palestinian peers in the occupied West Bank. 

Erika's monograph Rethinking human rights: critical insights from Palestinian youth (Hart/Bloomsbury 2024) explores 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 the layers of injustice of their lived experiences outside school. It draws on empirical research and is informed by decolonial, third world approaches and Islamic contributions to human rights and human rights education. 

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.