Conference: Rethinking Rights in the Global South

This one-day conference, to be held at Trinity College on 11 May 2018, will be launched by the Vice-Chancellor at 10am. 

The Conference is organised by the Centre of South Asian Studies and the new Consortium for the Study of the Global South. Scholarship on the global South has frequently focused on the political rights of individuals citizens as enshrined in constitutions and other foundational legal documents.  Yet the language of right has been used and contested outside institutional arenas by a range of political actors. 'Rights claims' resonate across all aspects of social life, and are used in formal, state-oriented mobilisation as much as in informal social activism.

This conference will explore alternative conceptions of rights in the global  South.  We intend to open up the idea of rights  to a range of claims-making activities to destabilise the conception of rights an inevitably linked to the individual and autonomous. 

Scholars from across Cambridge and beyond who have agreed to participate  include  Emma Hunter (Edinburgh), Rochana Bajpai (SOAS), Polly O'Hanlon (Oxford), Humeira Iqtidar, (KCL), Shohini Ghosh (Jamia Milia Islami), Tomas Larsson, (Cambridge), Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS), Edward Anderson (Cambridge), Abdullah Awad (Cambridge), Patrick Clibbens (Cambridge) and Joya Chatterji (Cambridge). Other members of the Consortium, including the directions of African Studies, Latin American Studies and Development Studies, will also take part in the discussion. 

To register for this event click here.