Conference of Humanities Institute and the Human Rights Institute of the University of Connecticut
October 10-12, 2008 • Storrs, CT
Kimsooja, Bottari Truck, 2000, 2.5 ton truck stacked with Bottaris, installation view at Rodin Gallery, Seoul. Photo by Kim Hyunsoo. Courtesy of The Samsung Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul
The central aim of this conference is to think through the rapidly expanding body of scholarship on humanitarianism – both as a discourse and practice – beyond its longtime amalgamated human rights framework. We hope to better understand the concept of humanitarianism as it is currently deployed around the globe, and to assess its future as a guiding political principle for behavior on the individual, state, and transnational levels. Our complementary focus on responsibility leads us to interrogate how humanitarianism defines obligation towards the other, to consider the effects of such definitions – including the limitations they impose – and to raise problems and possibilities for alternative conceptions of the ties that bind humans together.
Conference organizers: Alexis Dudden and Kerry Bystrom. Please continue to check this website for updated information.
Sponsored by Foundations of Humanitarianism, the Human Rights Institute and UCHI’s Foundations of Humanitarianism Initiative.
Conference Information
Conference Agenda
Friday October 10th
4:00pm Keynote Lecture: (Open to the public) | “A World History of Genocide”
- Ben Kiernan, Yale University | Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center
- Reception to follow
Saturday October 11
All panels will be held in the Rome Ballroom and are open to the public by pre-registration only.
9:00-10:30am “Coding the Humanitarian”
- Jacqueline Bhabha, Harvard University
- Timothy Shorrock, Independent journalist
- Ron Dudai, University of York
- Moderator: Alexis Dudden, UConn
10:45am-12:15pm “Institutional Responsibility”
- Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australia National University
- David Forsythe, University of Nebraska;
- Selma Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam
- Moderators: David Leheny, Princeton University and Emma Gilligan, UConn
1:15-3:00pm “The Morality of Responsibility”
- Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker/University of East London
- Eyal Weizman, Architect/University of London
- Christiane Schonfeld, National University of Ireland
- Moderators: Mark Bradley, University of Chicago and Thomas Keenan, Bard College
3:15-4:30pm “Culture, Theory, Responsibility”
- Mark Sanders, NYU
- Jennifer Wenzel, Universityof Michigan
- Sarah Nuttall, WISER/University of the Witwatersrand
- Moderator: Eleni Coundouriotis, UConn
4:30pm “In the Balance”
- Nuruddin Farah, Novelist; Zakes Mda, Novelist
- Joseph Slaughter, Columbia University
- Moderator: Kerry Bystrom, UConn
Speakers
- Jacqueline Bhabha, Harvard University
- Mark Bradley, University of Chicago Ron Dudai,University of York Nuruddin Farah, Novelist
- David Forsythe, University of Nebraska Thomas Keenan, Bard College
- Ben Kiernan, Yale University
- David Leheny, Princeton University
- Selma Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam Zakes Mda, Novelist
- Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australia National University
- Sarah Nuttall, WISER/University of the Witwatersrand
- Mark Sanders, NYU
- Christiane Schonfeld, National University of Ireland
- Timothy Shorrock, Independent journalist
- Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker/University of East London
- Joseph Slaughter, Columbia University
- Eyal Weizman, Architect/University of London
- Jennifer Wenzel, University of Michigan
Organizer Biographies
Alexis Dudden (PhD, Chicago, 1998) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of “Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States” (Columbia University, 2008) and “Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power” (University of Hawaii, 2005) as well as a number of articles and Internet essays. She is currently researching the politics of food security in Northeast Asia and its ramifications for humanitarian response and action. She teaches courses on modern Japanese and Korean history.
Kerry Bystrom (PhD, Princeton, 2007) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is currently at work on a manuscript exploring the public role that the retelling of “roots,” genealogies, and other family origin stories has played in the recent Argentine and South African transitions to democracy. She is also developing a project that focuses on the move beyond “human rights” to rival ethical paradigms of responsibility in contemporary fiction by JM Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Dr. Bystrom holds a B.A., summa cum laude, in Government and English/Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, NH. She has taught at Princeton University, NJ; Bard College, NY; and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and author of forthcoming articles on South African and Argentine literary and cultural studies.