Dear friends of the Human Rights Program,
I'm Hollie Nyseth Brehm, a 4th year sociology Ph.D. student with a human rights minor, and I'm writing you on behalf of the human rights minor graduate students. We strive to hold at least one colloquium that focuses on our students' research each semester, and I wanted to let you know that this semester's colloquium will take place on Monday April 23th from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Room 260 of the Social Sciences Building. Two students pursuing human rights minors will be presenting their research:
Corbin Treacy
The first part of my talk looks at recent attempts to articulate why literary scholars should embrace human rights as an analytical lens and why literary reading and critique might be useful to human rights workers. Scholars from across disciplines have in the past decade worked to deepen our understanding of the social, ethical, and political consequences of the shared foundations of human rights work and the humanities. James Dawes, Joseph Slaughter, Elizabeth Goldberg, Alexandra Moore, and Domna Stanton have all to some extent considered the power of stories to normalize and make intelligible laws, philosophies, and cultural practices and productively interrogate the ways in which these stories also produce material effects, participating in the very construction of those laws and practices. After plotting the central trajectories of this recent scholarship, I will discuss some contemporary Algerian novels and films that respond in probing ways to these critical theories and test the limits of language, translation, and representation to reflect on subjectivity in the modern state.
Leah Entenmann
The National Assembly of Uganda voted in February 2012 to reconsider the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) that MP David Bahati first introduced in 2009. In its current form, the AHB mandates execution for "aggravated homosexuality," life imprisonment for "the offense of homosexuality," and up to three years' incarceration for failure to report another's homosexual act. U.S.-based Evangelical groups are alleged to be a driving force behind the development of the legislation, and yet Ugandan officials respond to Western advocacy for LGBT human rights with accusations of cultural imperialism. The organization Sexual Minorities Uganda may be able to circumvent this argument by targeting the U.S.-based instigators of persecution in a pending lawsuit against Reverend Scott Lively and Abiding Truth Ministries.
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Katherine Fennelly
Professor
Humphrey School of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
301 19th Ave. S
Minneapolis, MN 55455
