Aleksandra Alekseenko

I am a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Law, University of Reading. I completed my PhD in Law at Reading in 2022, where my doctoral research examined whether an independent category of rights relating to the human body — somatic rights — can be justified within human rights theory. In doing so, I developed the concept of body integrity, analysing how the intrinsic connection between a person and their body grounds a fundamental right to decide about one’s own body.

Building on this work, I am developing a series of articles that further elaborate the theoretical framework of body integrity and its implications for legal reasoning. These include a manuscript under revision at Medical Law Review on the limits of mind-centred autonomy, and a further article under review at Human Rights Review on the moral justification for a fundamental right to decide about one’s own body.

Alongside this, I have developed a postdoctoral research project, The Human Body and Biotechnology: Building Bridges Between Rights and Innovation, submitted to the Wellcome Trust with the University of Oxford as the host institution. The project examines how rights related to the human body can be identified and analysed in the context of biotechnology development, and explores how human-rights-based approaches can be translated into engagement strategies and practical guidelines for industry.