Kevin Irakoze

Kevin Irakoze is a PhD student in Philosophy. He works in Africana social and political philosophy. His dissertation thinksthe relation between the disaster of colonization in Africa and contemporary possibilities for imagining the future. His other projects includean exploration of the idea of “unhopeful hope” from W.E.B. Du Bois's writings, and a reflection on the discourse of contamination/anti-humanity with regards to queer persons in African sociopolitics.Project Description:My project studies conceptions of the human and human rights in relation to queer life in Africa. Reading a case study of a denial of the humanity of the queer person, I theorize the conceptual basis for that denial for what constitutes the human in the specific context. Moving away from common arguments around cultural, religious, or political exclusion as hindrances to queer human rights, the research provides a reading of exclusion grounded in ontological reality through a particular conception of the life-death cycle of the human being. Thinking of human rights in relation to queer life in this context, I argue, must contend with this conception of the human and the anti-human.