Kamari Maxine Clarke

Maxine Kamari Clarke (born 3 April 1966) is a Canadian-American scholar with family roots in Jamaica. As of 2020, she is a distinguished professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Education and career Clarke is a specialist on theories of legal pluralism, international justice, and social theory. A few years later, she moved to New York City to pursue her Master of Arts in political anthropology at The New School for Social Research. In September of the same year, she began a doctorate in anthropology at the University of California—Santa Cruz.

During her time as a professor at Yale University, she completed a Master in the Study of Law in 2003. Between 2004 and 2005, she spent a year at York University as a visiting scholar in the anthropology department and in 2015 as a visiting research professor at the University of Toronto.

Research and publications

Affective Justice Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback was written by Kamari Maxine Clarke and published by Duke University Press in November 2019. Affective Justice explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Affective Justice was the winner of the 2019 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology and a finalist for the 2019 AAA's Association for African Anthropology Elliott P. Skinner Book Award.

Mapping Yorùbá Networks Mapping Yorùbá Networks was written by Kamari Maxine Clarke and published by the Duke University Press in July 2004. It is an ethnography of Òyótúnjí, an establishment of the ancient Yoruba Empire that was founded in South Carolina in 1970. Clarke explores how the language of international justice is created through the embodiment of values of human rights in rule of law movements. The anthology was published by the Duke University Press in July 2006 and contains essay contributions by Deborah A. Thomas, Lee D. Baker, Robert Lee Adams Jr., Jacqueline N. Brown, Tina M. Campt, Naomi Pabst, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, John L. Jackson, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Grant Farred, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Oneka LaBennet, Raymond Codrington, Len Sawyer and Kamari Maxine Clarke. A team of anthropologists consisting of Mary Catherine Bateson, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Rebecca Hardin, Csilla Kalocsai, Macia Inhorn, George Marcus, J. Lorand Matory, Sidney Mintz and Melissa Remis, explore the changes they have witnessed in ethnography, as a method and as an intellectual approach. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. It is scheduled to be published in April 2019 by Cambridge University Press. The Wenner Gren Foundation is a private foundation that funds international anthropological research.

ACRI Expert for the African Union The African Court Research Initiative (ACRI) is a collaborative endeavor that explores the academic and functional implications of the creation of an African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights. ACRI studies and publishes reports on how this new court should be implemented and how it could work in relation to other mechanisms of international justice. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (2020) National Science Foundation Grant (2020) UCLA Transdisciplinary Research Acceleration Grant (2020) Recipient, 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute's Amaury Talbot Book Prize for Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Push-back Carleton University Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Award (2017–18) Wenner-Gren Foundation Research Award (2009-2011) National Science Foundation (2012)