From: Paul Longmore,
Deadline March 15, 2010
Call for Papers and Proposals: The Question of Rights
San Francisco State University will host a conference September 16-17, 2010 exploring the question and place of rights in history, politics, and society.
Rights, both individual and collective, have long been a theme in American society, often seen in conflict with state power. We welcome papers on assertions of rights by insurgent groups, resistance to rights claims, and governmental efforts to suppress or promote rights, in areas including but not limited to: civil liberties; disability rights; labor and economic rights; feminism and antiracism; immigration; environmental justice; access to healthcare;
the prison industrial complex; sexual orientation; the stateless; and human rights.
Our goal is to bring together a wide variety of people from a range of academic, activist, legal, and community spaces to examine the place of rights within the context of American society (as situated within a boarder global political community). To that end, we welcome participation from historians, both senior and junior scholars, graduate students, community advocates, archivists, and lawyers. We invite proposals for individual papers, panels, or roundtables.
The deadline for submission of proposals, consisting of an abstract of 1000 words for panel and workshop proposals or 300 words for individual presentations and a one-page CV for each participant, is March 15, 2010. Send your proposals to Christopher Waldrep, Department of History, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California 94132 or via email to cwaldrep@sfsu.edu.
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(h/t H-SCI-MED-TECH)
Paul Longmore is one of the founding figures in the history of disability in the U.S., and virtually anything he is involved in is significant from a medical humanities perspective. This looks to be a great conference, and in particular, I would hope some noble contributor would be willing to challenge the utility of rights talk as a means to justice. Too often, in my view, justice is reduced to a fairly banal discussion of rights as conceptualized in the classical liberal tradition, which has many strengths, but also some profound weaknesses, less frequently discussed. Such a conference seems like it might be a nice opportunity to engage along these lines.
But, enough editorializing. Even if you love rights talk, you should still consider submitting!
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