Dr Therese Mortensen

Research area: Children’s rights from anthropological, socio-legal and vernacular perspectives; children’s rights in India; child helplines; critical approaches to children’s rights studies; NGO roles and NGO-state relations in child rights implementation; duty bearing of human rights; ethnographic methods; youth rights-based climate activism and litigation, in particular in India.

 

Current work: Until 2028, Therese will be working under an international postdoc grant from the Swedish Research Council to ethnographically investigate children and young people's possibilities for legal rights-based climate activism in India. The project is based at Lund University, but with collaboration with BML Munjal University (India) and Antwerp University (Belgium)

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Education: Therese completed her PhD in Human Rights Studies from Lund University (Sweden) in 2023. Her PhD examined the role of NGOs as implementers of children’s rights in an India that is simultaneously neoliberal and autocratising, and it demonstrates the complex negotiating strategies of NGO workers who want to remain legitimate and significant for children’s rights in this environment. Prior to her doctoral studies, she completed a European Master of Arts (E.MA) in Human Rights and Democratisation, where her thesis looked at the local manifestations of Article 20 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the right to live in a family environment. She also has a BA in South Asian Studies from Copenhagen University (Denmark).

 

Teaching and work experience: She has taught courses on Human Rights, NGOs and Civil Society and Research Methods and Research Ethics to students at the interdisciplinary Human Rights BA and MA programmes at Lund University. She has also supervised several BA theses in the same programme. She has worked as a Coordinator for the Swedish South Asian Studies Network at Lund University. Before her academic career, she worked in project management at a number of child rights NGOs in Denmark, India and Australia.