[Reader-list] HUMAN RIGHTS BEYOND THE LAW: Call for Papers/ Proposals

[OISHIK SIRCAR]

*HUMAN RIGHTS BEYOND THE LAW: POLITICS, PRACTICES AND PERFORMANCES OF
PROTEST

September 15-17, 2011, Jindal Global Law School, NCR of Delhi, India*

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*

*WORKSHOP ANNOUCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS/ PROPOSALS*

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*

*‘Human Rights Beyond the Law: Politics, Practices, Performances of Protest’
*, is a workshop being organized by the *Collaborative Research Programme on
Law, Postcoloniality and Culture* at the *Jindal Global Law School*, NCR of
Delhi, India. The workshop is supported by the *Brown International Advanced
Research Institutes*, Brown University, USA.

*
*

*POSING THE PROBLEM*

Human Rights, liberalism’s most potent aphrodisiac, is an inescapable
concern for many of us in the academy, despite our critical consciousness
about the cruelly liberal genealogy of its idea and practice. For us human
rights remains, to invoke Gayatri Spivak: “that which we cannot not want.”
This consciousness has constituted each of us (and our subterranean others)
as ‘desiring’ nationalist, heterosexual and entrepreneurial subjects to whom
liberalism offers means like the market, secularism, merit, multiculturalism
– and of course Human Rights Law – as remedies for inequality,
subordination, exclusion and annihilation.

How then do we engage the law, without falling into the trap of liberalism?
Can we afford to completely disengage with liberal rights? At what cost do
we move beyond the legalese of human rights? Does speaking the liberal
language operate as a strategy for people’s movements, or is it a co-option
of it? And as Wendy Brown enquires: “how might the paradoxical elements of
the struggle for rights in an emancipatory context articulate a field of
justice beyond “that which we cannot not want”?” One way to articulate a
field of justice beyond “that which we cannot not want” is to document
practices and performances of protest – as Resistance, Solidarity and
Insurgency – in the postcolony that are deeply committed to talking ‘Human
Rights’ but beyond and without the disciplined captivity of law, modernity
and markets.

Discussions at this workshop would aim at displacing the centrality of the
law in giving meaning to ideas of justice and its liberal vicissitudes and
to chart the limits of the legal archive. The ‘beyond’ metaphor is not a
disengagement with the law, but one which allows us to delimit law’s
habitus. This workshop chooses to focus on the materiality of subaltern
protests by travelling through various forms of re/presentations of peoples,
spaces, their resistances and acts of solidarity and insurgency in the
postcolony that don’t require the law’s scaffolding to erect its
articulation of rights.

The workshop hopes to draw on the diversity of experiences of its
participants to engage in a “counter-topographic” mapping of protest
practices by ‘old’ and ‘new’ subalterns, particularly across certain
locations in the conventional North, the Antipodes, Latin Americas, Africa
and South and South East Asia. Along with being a project in building
transnational solidarity through activist scholarship, it will also build an
archive of images/ representations of performances of protest to put theory
under the scanner of “small voice[s] of history”.

*THEMATIC CLUSTERS*

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*

The workshop will be organized around five thematic clusters:**

*I.                 **The Tyranny of Rights*

*II.                **Re/presentations of Resistance*

*III.             **Bodies in Protest*

*IV.             **Organizing the Transnational*

*V.               **Technologies of Subversion*

*KEYNOTES*

*
*

*Jasbir Puar *(Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, USA)*,
Anthony Bogues *(Africana Studies, Brown University, USA)*, Rustom Bharucha
*(Independent Writer, Culture Critic and Dramaturge, India)*, Boaventura De
Sousa Santos *(Sociology, University of Coimbra, Portugal)*,    Gail Omvedt
*(Dalit Studies Scholar and Activist, Indira Gandhi National Open
University, India)**

*CALL FOR PAPERS/ PROPOSALS*

The workshop aims to bring together scholars, activists, illustrators,
performers, musicians, photographers and filmmakers to excavate archives and
imagine repertoires of bodily practices of subaltern protest that both
engage and critique the law. Abstracts/ proposals should pertain broadly to
the theme of the workshop and its five thematic clusters. Non-English
abstracts/ proposals are also welcome as long as it is accompanied by an
English translation/ transcreation.  If you’d like to discuss your abstract/
proposal before submitting it, please feel free to write to any of the
organizing committee members (emails below). More details on the workshop
are available at *www.protestworkshop.jgu.edu.in*

Paper abstracts, proposals to curate exhibitions/ films, and proposals for
performances (not exceeding 1000 words) need to be emailed to *
protestworkshop.india at jgu.edu.in* no later than *March 30, 2011*. Decisions
will be announced by April 30, 2011.

*PUBLICATION PLANS

*Organizers are in negotiation with publishers to consider either an edited
book volume (which will include illustrations/ art work/ photographs) and/or
a special issue of a journal emerging from of the workshop. **

*FUNDING*

Partial funding for travel may be available for participants from Southern
countries only whose abstracts/ proposals have been accepted. If you require
funding, please attach a letter with your abstract/ proposal. Decisions
regarding funding will be made only after acceptance of abstracts/
proposals.

*ACCESSIBILITY*

The workshop organizers are committed to making the conference architecture
fully accessible and disabled friendly.**

*ORGANIZING COMMITTEE*

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*

*OISHIK SIRCAR*, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat,
India - osircar at jgu.edu.in
*VIK KANWAR*, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, India
-  vkanwar at jgu.edu.in
*RAJSHREE CHANDRA*, Associate Professor, Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi
University, India - rajshreechandra at yahoo.in
*NAVPRIT KAUR*, Research Associate, Institute for Development and
Communication, Chandigargh, India - navspreet at gmail.com


*ABOUT THE COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAMME IN LAW, POSTCOLONIALITY AND
CULTURE (CRPLPC)*

The CRPLPC opens up a space hitherto not available within law schools in
India that will accommodate non-law scholars concerned with the working of
the law in a postcolonial context to dialogue without the constraints of
disciplinary boundaries. It will be a space that will bring together, among
others, Feminists, Marxists, Theologists, Queer Theorists, Dalit Scholars,
Crip Theorists to dialogue, debate and disturb the assumptions that underlie
an uncritical reading of the life and times of law, society, culture and the
market in postcolonial societies.

CRPLPC will be a forum-based initiative that will operate as an intellectual
clearing house engaged in convening workshops/ conferences, reading groups,
building a network of academics, activists, writers, filmmakers, musicians
and performers, of research centres on critical theory and postcolonial
studies around the world, and remain committed to publishing sophisticated
theoretical scholarship at the interstices of law, culture studies,
postcolonial theory and critical theory.



-- 
OISHIK SIRCAR

oishiksircar at gmail.com
oishik.sircar at utoronto.ca