PROPOSAL FOR THE CREATION OF AN INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH TRAINING GROUP ON THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMANITARIANISM
Power and Humanity: Contesting notions of human rights and humanitarianism in North America
PG Stage 2 submitted to SSHRC November 2017
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A partnership for the creation of an International Research Training Group (IRTG), entitled Power and humanity: contesting North American notions of human rights and humanitarianism, aims to create a highly innovative method of teaching graduate students how to address the critical contemporary dilemmas of globalization, securitization, and difference playing out in Europe and North America today. We do this by focusing attention on the protean concept of "humanity" itself. At the heart of this are the challenges of instantiating cross-border human rights and mutual aid without the language of universal "humanity" that animated the age of Euro-American empire. Is there an alternative to this universalism, on the one hand, and the essentialism of identity politics on the other? Canada, the United States, and Germany have especially 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 example of crimes against humanity against which North American human rights discourses developed their conceptual orientation. These developments are the formative elements of each of their respective national identities.
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Our IRTG will create an international graduate cohort that examines the relationship between the forms of social power that have accompanied globalization, and the articulation of humanity as its principal object. We propose the creation of a 7-year structure of graduate supervision, training, and knowledge mobilization, that creates a consortium of human rights and humanitarianism researchers and practitioners at Carleton University, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin, the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, and the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. It also partners with prominent advocacy NGOs, notably the Montréal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, and the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect in New York City, among others.
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Our research theme examines the contradictory encounters with human rights and humanitarian aid/intervention in the North American context, and aims to use that knowledge to better understand the concept of "humanity" under globalization. We integrate the disciplinary complexity of these issues with policy design and practice, bringing together advanced students from Canada, the U.S., and Germany to serve as translators and interlocutors of different national experiences. We also propose that students engage in service-learning by partnering their research with civil society agents. This encourages the development of research directed toward the needs of practitioners, but also will serve as a method of pedagogy itself. Our project has a structural insistence on interdisciplinarity, multilingualism, and engagement between academics and practitioners in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The pedagogical purpose of researching across borders (national and disciplinary) is to do a better job of connecting the mutable idea of "humanity" to the practices that have integrated the world in new forms of global governance and provided the contexts for diverse forms of resistance and contestation. We seek to make this a permanent model of the way graduate and professional training should be undertaken so that there is a more seamless and circular flow of experience, and research between universities and practitioners.