Brooke Ackerly is Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. In her research, teaching, and collaborations, she works to clarify without simplifying the most pressing problems of global justice, including human rights and climate change. Using feminist methodologies, she integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism and the experiences of those affected by injustice (Grounded Normative Theory). Her major works include Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge 2008), Doing Feminist Research with Jacqui True (Palgrave Macmillan 2010, 2019), and Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice (Oxford University Press 2018).

Ackerly teaches courses on justice, ethics and public policy, feminist theory, feminist research methods, human rights, contemporary political thought, and gender and the history of political thought. She was co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2018-2021). She has consulted for the Global Fund for Women. She is currently consulting for Prospera International on women’s movement funding and is part of the UNWomen Expert Group on gender and climate change. 

Since 1993 she has conducted research in Bangladesh. She is currently leading research in Bangladesh in climate change, health, infrastructure, and the intersections of formal and informal governance. Since 2016 she has been leading research in a rural county of Tennessee on environmental justice, health (primarily cancer), infrastructure, and the challenges of governance in economically, environmentally, and politically disadvantaged communities.

During her fellowship at HIAS she will be completing with co-author and long-time partner, anthropologist Mujibul Anam, a book on climate change justice in which they argue that climate change justice requires that we think about injustice in ways that take on the challenges of long embedded patterns of formal and informal governance because taking up responsibility for injustice is not only about understanding the multiply complex causes of injustice but also about identifying multiple pathways for addressing them going forward.

Her tandem partner is Antje Wiener, professor for Political Science and Global Governance at Universität Hamburg. 

Brooke Ackerly’s HIAS Fellowship is funded by the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS.