As a critical part of the growing partnership between the John-F-Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin, Carleton will be hosting a two-day workshop devoted to the further development of our common research interests, and the construction of an International Research Training Group or IRTG.
The theme of the workshop revolves around the urgency of finding new ways of conceiving of the world’s diversity and working intelligently within it. At the heart of that question are the dilemmas of instantiating cross-border human rights and mutual aid without using the language of universal “humanity” that animated the age of Euro-American hegemony. Is there an alternative to the ethnocentrism of this universalism, on the one hand, and the essentialism of identity politics on the other? Canada, the United States, and Germany have, for their own peculiar reasons, fraught relationships with these questions. The first two are immigrant, settler colonial societies and agents in promoting contemporary concepts of human rights, humanitarian aid, responsibility-to-protect, and the idea of universal human dignity. Yet they, like Germany, have histories of dehumanization: slavery, territorial dispossession, forced relocation, cultural genocide, and, in Germany’s case, the paradigmatic historical example of crimes against humanity. These developments are the formative, if still much contested, elements of their respective national identities.
This partnership for the creation of an IRTG, entitled Power and humanity: contesting notions of human rights and humanitarianism in North America, addresses these vital questions in an exchange between European and North American traditions. It investigates the relationship between forms of social power that have accompanied globalization, and the articulation of humanity as its principal object. This workshop will bring together the principle members of this project—both established and emerging scholars, as well as graduate students—for two days of research coordination, curriculum development, and discussion of the structure of our proposed graduate training program. For more information, contact Andrew M. Johnston.