Dr. Sonya Cotton is a Jewish South African academic who grew up in a close-knit religious community in Cape Town. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Dublin City University on a project involving feminist care ethics and international law. Her PhD, which was nominated for the Dr. Máire de Paor Best PhD Thesis award at UCD, examined colonial and apartheid ontologies of collective personhood in international law, and how this impacts collective land claims in post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa. More specifically, she is interested in the ways international law is both useful and ineffective as a mechanism for self-determination, decolonisation and spatial justice. She has a Master's in Chinese law from Peking University, and other degrees in comparative law in Africa, linguistics and isiXhosa from the University of Cape Town. She is a member of South African Jews for a Free Palestine and JVPI.