Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

The third Workshop will be conducted by Cassandra Falke and Ted Laros on the topic of Literature and Human Rights.

This workshop will focus on literary representations of human rights abuses. Increasingly, scholars “look to literature to gain access to as well as incarnate those facets of selfhood that liberal human rights discourses obscure” (Anker 2) – embodied experience, collective memory, the singularity of the event. Literature seems to offer a freer discursive space in which people can tell a richer tale than the restrictions of legal testimony allow. But literary conventions and book markets impose their own restrictions in terms of both narrative form and who is empowered to write and publish. The workshop will explore contrasts, complementarity and historical intersections between literature and human rights, giving special attention to two works of contemporary fiction as “case studies” for contemporary methods of interdisciplinary work.

Our second Workshop will be held by Jeannine DeLombard and Bryan Wagner on the topic of Police and Person.

From Black Lives Matter, vaccine mandates, and immigration to environmental initiatives, reproductive rights, and corporate power, the terms “police” and “person” figure prominently in current legal-cultural debates. Yet, the tendency to define these terms narrowly –police as law enforcement and the person as a human being –often obscures the larger stakes of these and other controversies. With a session devoted to each term, this workshop seeks to enrich our understanding of the complex meanings that have attached to “police” and “person” in Western law and culture.We look forward to an open and wide-ranging discussion informed by, but not tethered to, our common readings.