Monday, July 20, 2015

Putting Things to Rights: Postcolonial Legal Humanities

Putting Things to Rights: Postcolonial Legal Humanities
International Postgraduate / Early Career Conference organized by
Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds
Postcolonial Humanities Forum
Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick
27 and 28 November, 2015, University of Warwick
In a world more and more defined by postcolonial and postimperial globalized conflicts the harrowing questions of human rights have become extremely urgent and tangled. This jointly organized conference aims to bring together a number of senior scholars in the fields of postcolonial studies and legal studies with a group of early career and postgraduate colleagues to articulate common grounds for further research and analysis. The group of participants, between twenty-five and thirty, will convene for one and a half days at the University of Warwick.
This will be the first organized event of the Postcolonial Humanities Forum, an international research network (previously funded by AHRC and NWO) that brings together scholars from the Universities of Leeds and Warwick (UK), Munich (Germany), Utrecht (Netherlands), Roskilde (Denmark), Padua (Italy), Chicago and UCLA (USA) and ANU (Australia).
The specific aim of the PHF is to investigate those pressing societal issues that have been raised by the relatively recent emergence of three important ‘new humanities’ fields––Digital Humanities, Environmental Humanities and Legal Humanities––while its more general objective is to identify and develop methodological tools and concepts that might allow for a better understanding of new approaches to humanities research from a number of comparative perspectives that are both contemporary and historical, both local and global in scope. ‘New humanities’ fields are conspicuously transnational as well as trans-disciplinary, allowing for a better understanding of those rapid global transformations that exceed the jurisdictions of the traditional nation-state. The postcolonial paradigm will be called upon to tackle complex issues of interpenetration and co-dependency from the position of subalternity or minority, and to gauge in how far the humanities have been able to respond to these new challenges, which, for all their borderless character, continue to reproduce unequal relations between global North and South.