Description: This plenary examines central but overlooked questions in the human rights regime: What constitutes the human? What are its limits and exclusions? How do normative definitions shift over time and place in discursive forms? What role does technology play in altering the boundaries between human and nonhuman, animal, and plant life? How can critique help to transform definitions (and perceptions) of slaves, refugees, the stateless, and terrorists among other others?

Presentations

1: Impasse and Futurity: The Category of the Human

Judith Butler, U of California, Berkeley

2: Speculative Human Rights: Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence

James Dawes, Macalester C

3: Human Rights and the Nonhuman in the Anthropocene

Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U

4: Hope in the Human Sharia

Mark Fathi Massoud, U of California, Santa Cruz

Presider

Domna C. Stanton, Graduate Center, City U of New York