The Third Annual GNHRE Symposium
The third annual GNHRE symposium will take place at the 2014 IUCN Academy of Environmental Law Colloquium, to be held in the beautiful city of Tarragona, Spain. The Colloquium runs from 30th June – 5th July – and the GNHRE Symposium takes place on 30th June and 1st of July over a highly interactive, stimulating two day programme.
GNHRE Symposia are warmly appreciated for their imaginative, conversational and intellectually sustained engagement with the issues under consideration. Former participants have described the events as being among the best they have ever been part of as academics. This year will be no exception.
The theme for the Symposium is ‘Reimagining “humanity” in the nexus between human rights and the environment.’ This year’s theme invites engagement with the central question of ‘who we think we are’ as human beings and ‘where we think we are’ in terms of our understanding of the world we inhabit and which inhabits us. How might the relationship between human rights and the environment be reconfigured by renewed understandings and engagements with the question of who we are? How do human rights construct and shape a vision of who we are and in what kind of world? What different concepts and constructs are at play in the human rights trope? How does environmental law construct ‘nature’? How do legal relations portray, fix or shape the relationship between ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’? Are there patterns we can recognize and change in the nexus between human rights and the environment? How might such changes affect the future? How might change be effected and operationalized? What laws, policies and practices would best embody new ways of being and seeing adequate to an energy-intensive world in climate crisis?The list of such questions is open-ended – and you are invited to explore the central Symposium theme as richly as you wish. There are four thematic areas in which abstracts are invited:
1) Philosophical Re-Investigations
2) Reconfiguring the Legal
3) Activism and Praxis
4) Multi-level Reformulation
Please send abstracts for consideration to GrearA1@cardiff.ac.uk and Louis.Kotze@nwu.ac.za
You may wish to read the publication based on the first GNHRE Symposium, held in 2012 at the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain and available on their journal page.
Abstracts should be submitted by March 1st 2014. After that time, invitations to attend will be warmly issued.