Maria Grahn-Farley (University of Gothenburg, School of Law, Sweden)

Professor Maria Grahn-Farley is a child rights legal theorist. Her research focuses on the intersection of childhood, race, and gender - and the role of law in the making of the child as a rights-holding subject. Her recent book, Child Rights, Legal Theory and Social Advocacy (Cambridge University Press 2024) examines how the decline in Western democracies changes the conditions for human rights and its defense at its core.  She currently leads a research project and is the coordinator of HR Just – a Horizon project funded by the European Union. The project examines how individual human rights protection is affected by the State's use of human rights as an instrument of governance, to justify and defend their actions, instead of as originally intended as a measurement of State compliance with the purpose of protecting individual persons against the abuse of the State. The project analyses the gaps in individual human rights protection that appear when the possession of rights is transferred from the individual to the State.

Education: Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) Harvard Law School, USA, Master of Law (LL.M) Harvard Law School, USA, and Master of Law (LL.M) University of Gothenburg, Sweden.