Dr. Avigail Eisenberg

Office hours

On leave 1 January - 30 June 2025.

Interests

• democratic theory
• normative political theory
• history of ideas (19th-20th C)
• pluralism
• multiculturalism/Identity politics

About Dr. Eisenberg

Avigail Eisenberg is a professor in the Department of Political Science.

Her publications include 2 monographs, 8 edited books and numerous research papers which have been translated into French, Polish, Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin. She has convened several conferences and workshops and hosted numerous academic visitors at UVic as co-founder of the Victoria Colloquium on Legal and Political Thought and the Consortium on Democratic Constitutionalism.

Professor Eisenberg has held visiting research fellowships at Cornell University, Hebrew University, University of Cagliari, University of Montreal, and University of Edinburgh. She has taught masterclasses on diversity and pluralism at Concordia University, Hebrew University and UVic. She was awarded a visiting fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy in 2003. She has been a faculty fellow at UVic’s Centre for Global Studies and the Centre for the Study in Religion and Society. In 2010, she received UVic’s Faculty of Social Sciences Research Excellence Award.

Teaching

Teaching 2024-25

Fall 2024: 

• POLI 309: Democracy and Disobedience
• POLI 509/609: Political Theory Graduate Field Seminar

Spring 2025:

• Study Leave January 1 - June 30, 2025

Publications

Books (monographs and edited)

• Recognition versus Self-determination: Dilemmas of Emancipatory Politics, co-edited with Jeremy Webber, Glen Coulthard and Andree Boisselle, Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2014.
• Identity Politics in the Public Realm: Bringing Institutions Back In, co-edited with Will Kymlicka, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.
• Reasons of Identity: A normative guide to the political and legal assessment of identity claims, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Sexual Justice / Cultural Justice, co-edited with Barbara Arneil, Monique Deveaux and Rita Dhamoon, London: Routledge, 2007.
• Diversity and Equality: The Changing Framework of Freedom in Canada edited, Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2006.
• Minorities within Minorities, edited with Jeff Spinner-Halev, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender and the Construction of Canada, co-edited Veronica Strong-Boag, Sherril Grace and Joan Anderson, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.
• Reconstructing Political Pluralism, Albany, New York: SUNY, 1995, pp. ix, 211.

Chapters and journal articles (selected)

• Religious Autonomy and Authority. In Ben Colburn ed., Routledge Handbook of Autonomy, London: Routledge, 2022, 371-82.
• Multiculturalism and Decolonization. In Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Alain-G. Gagnon and Arjun Tremblay, eds. Assessing Multiculturalism in a Global Comparative Perspective: A New Politics of Diversity for the 21st Century, London: Routledge 2023, pp. 83-98.
• Decolonizing Political Authority: The Conflict on Wet’suwet’en Territory, Canadian Journal of Political Science 2021: 1-19. DOI:10.1017/S0008423921000858.
• Multiculturalism and Decolonization, 2021 Canadian Diversity/Diversité Canadienne: Special issue on Multiculturalism @50, 18(1) Autumn 2021 42-6.
• The Rights of National Majorities: Toxic Discourse or Democratic Catharsis? Ethnicities, 20:2 (2020) 312-330. DOI: 10.1177/1468796819866488.
• Consent, Resistance and the Duty to Consult, International Journal of Group and Minority Rights, 27 (2019) 270-90. 
• Protecting minority and majority cultures: Risks and best practices, in Luis Efrén Rìos Vega, Ilenia Ruggiu, Irene Spigno (eds.), Justice and Culture. Theory and Practice Concerning the Use of Culture, Napoli: Editoriale Scientifica, 2019.
• Pluralism and the Authority of Groups to Discriminate, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, online first, May 2019. DOI:10.1080/13698230.2019.1610844.
• Multiculturalism, Multinationalism and Indigenous Rights: The Canadian Case, in Richard Ashcroft and Mark Bevir eds., Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth, University of California Press, 2019.
• The Challenges of Structural Injustice to Reconciliation, Ethics and Global Justice, vol 11, 2018:82-90.
• Three approaches to the Protection of Religious Freedom: Choice, Interest, Identity, Personal Autonomy in Plural Societies: A Principle and its Paradoxes, M-C Foblets, A. Dundes Renteln and M. Graziadei eds., London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 58-75.

Public essays (selected)

• British Columbia Special Committee to Review Provisions of the Election Act, "Parties, Political Compromise and Democratic Consolidation," BC Legislature, May 27, 2021.
• Climate Citizenship and the Rural Urban Divide, Verfassungsblog, Jan 27, 2020 .
• Multiculturalism and Sexism. Filozofuj 2016.