Abstract

This seminar will examine the status of human rights after the end of the transitional period of the post-Cold War, a time in which 'those protean forms of social action, assembled, by convention, under a portal named human rights' (Baxi 2003) became a central mode of contemporary world-making. The other side of the post-Cold War is shaping up into a period of new hierarchies of power, the consolidation of existing forms of governmentality, ideology, and vulnerability, and the emergence of new translocal social movements and projects of resistance. Human rights plays an important, if ambiguous, role throughout each of these developments.

The seminar will consider the following special topics: the contested idea of human rights; human rights and the problem of the state; politics and the practice of human rights; the problem of pathologies of power; and reproduction in the age of human rights.

Primary reference for the seminar will be the volume Human Rights at the Crossroads (M. Goodale, ed., Oxford UP, 2013).

Bio

Mark Goodale is an anthropologist, sociolegal scholar, and social theorist. He is currently Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. Before coming to George Mason, he was the first Marjorie Shostak Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at Emory University. He is the author or editor of eight books, including, most recently, Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (with Nancy Postero, Stanford UP, 2013), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford UP, 2012), Mirrors of Justice (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge UP, 2010), Surrendering to Utopia (Stanford UP, 2009), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (ed., Blackwell, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). Forthcoming books include The Bolivia Reader (with Sinclair Thomson, et. al., Duke UP, 2014). His writings have appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Social & Legal Studies, Anthropologie et Sociétés, and Ethnohistory, among others, and he is the author of the chapter on human rights in Blackwell's Companion to Moral Anthropology (2013) and the chapter on law in Blackwell's Companion to Latin American Anthropology (2008). He is currently working on a number of new projects, including a critical introduction to anthropology and law and an ethnography of revolution, folk cosmopolitanism, and neo-Burkeanism in Bolivia based on several years of research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Researcg.

Atctivity within the research group Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe),  Humanities, Migration and Peace Studies (NHUMEP)  and Doctoral Programmes 'Human Rights in Contemporary Societies' and 'Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship'