About
Dr Dina Lupin is an Associate Professor at the School of Law at the University of Southampton.
In their research, Dina examines the role of fundamental legal values (such as human dignity) in the context of environmental decision-making and they use feminist, queer and decolonial theory in their analysis of Indigenous epistemic and social resistance to unjust environmental processes and practices.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Environmental and human rights law
- Silencing
- Epistemic injustice
- Marginalised and oppressed groups
Current research
Dina’s research focuses on environmental and human rights law, with a particular focus on silencing and epistemic injustice in the context of consultation processes with marginalised and oppressed groups. Their current work is concerned with resistance and subversion by marginalised communities in the context of environmental human rights violations. Dina examines the ways in which legal tools designed to serve marginalised communities get repurposed and used against those communities (e.g. how Indigenous rights to consultation are used to silence Indigenous communities). Equally, Dina is interested in how oppressed communities repurpose and instrumentalise tools of oppression into tools of resistance.
Dina is an affiliated researcher in the project “Giving groups a proper say”, supported by the Austrian Science Fund and hosted at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna.
Dina also serves as an Editorial Board member on The Environmental Rights Review journal.
Publications
Teaching
Dina teaches public law, legal research and writing, and environmental justice and the law.
Biography
Before joining Southampton Law School, Dina was a researcher in the project “Giving groups a proper say”, supported by the Austrian Science Fund and hosted at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna.
Previously Dina worked as a Post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Tilburg researching civil society organisations working on sustainable development in Ethiopia.
Dina was awarded their PhD in 2017 by the Department of Public and International Law at the University of Oslo. Their PhD was on the concept of human dignity in the context of environmental law and governance and their thesis was published as a book, “Human Dignity and the Adjudication of Environmental Rights”, in 2020.
Dina completed their BA and LLB at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and their Master of Laws at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Prior to becoming an academic, Dina worked as a Senior Attorney at the Centre for Environmental Rights (cer.org.za) in Cape Town.
At the Centre, Dina represented a range of communities and activists in their battles for more transparent, accountable environmental and water management in the mining sector. Dina also led the Centre’s work on improving transparency in environmental governance.