Ingunn Ikdahl
Background
Ingunn Ikdahl was born 1976, and received her cand.jur. degree at the University of Oslo, 2003. As research assistant at the Department of Public and International Law 1999-2000, she wrote her student dissertation on the human rights protection for women’s land use, using the Tanzanian land tenure reform as point of departure to analyze developments in the concept of property rights. She studied EU law, international trade law and environmental law at the University of Nottingham 2002-2003.
Her doctoral thesis, “Securing women’s homes. The dynamics of women’s human rights at the international level and in Tanzania» (2010) combines analysis of the developments in international human rights law concerning rights to property, land and housing with a case study of national and local law in Tanzania.
Ikdahl was postdoctoral research fellow on the project Human rights and gender dimensions of water governance in Africa: Actors, norms and institutions from 2012 to 2014, before becoming associate professor at the Department of Public and International Law in July 2014, then Professor since 15 September 2016.
Fields of interest
Ikdahl’s main field of interest is the role of law for people’s livelihood, with particular attention to questions concerning the welfare state, care work and rights to natural resources. In the field of human rights law, she has focused on protection against discrimination as well as economic and social rights. Gender perspectives, interdisciplinarity and legal pluralism are other general perspectives in her research.
In Norwegian law, Ikdahl is conducting teaching and research in the fields of equality and discrimination law, welfare law, social security and human rights.
Ikdahl has also a long-term history of legal research and teaching in southern and eastern Africa, as well as in the field of law and development. Her focus has been on women’s law, human rights, development cooperation and international law generally, and rights to property, housing, land and water specifically. She was involved in establishing EDOLAD, a European Joint Doctorate Programme in Law and Development, and is currently on the board of this programme as well as teaching core curriculum modules. She is also teaching and supervising at the master programme in women’s law at the Southern and Eastern Africa Regional Centre for Women's Law SEARCWL, University of Zimbabwe.