Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

Our concluding workshop will be held by Leti Volpp and Marco Wan on the topic of Mobility and Rights.

Our first session approaches mobility as a key issue in the study of law and the humanities. What happens when legal texts, concepts, and/or persons move into new cultural contexts? We will consider familiar questions such as translation, narrative, and interpretation in a global frame. Students will be encouraged to reflect upon how questions of mobility might structure their own research.

Our second session will focus on the mobility of persons in relation to rights. We will consider the concept of the “right to have rights” as articulated by Hannah Arendt in 1951 in relation to the importance of belonging to an organized political community. We will discuss how “the right to have rights” been taken up in relation to migration and to citizenship, the importance of territorial presence in claims making by immigrants, and the role of rights discourse in migrant struggles.

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.