November 2010

Paths to Peace in Palestine/Israel

About the speaker:

Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and one of the most prominent US scholars and cultural and social critics. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003), and, most recently, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (2008, new ed. 2010). Professor Makdisi has also written numerous articles and commentaries on the Palestine-Israel situation for publications such as Journal of Contemporary Arab Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, London Review of Books and the San Francisco Chronicle, and is committed to the public inquiry of issues of conflict, post-conflict, and transition.

Sponsored by The Bean Trust, the Human Rights Centre, and the Essex Transitional Justice Network. Organised by the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies.

September 2010

Rehabilitation as a Form of Reparation: Opportunities and Challenges

Redress and the ETJN will be holding a closed workshop on Thursday 9 September 2010 at Essex University, Colchester campus.

Given the importance of the issue of rehabilitation in the context of reparations, in December 2009, Clara Sandoval wrote the report commissioned by Redress Rehabilitation as a Form of Reparation under International Law.

Following the previous initial effort, the workshop aims to bring together a group of experts (both academics and practitioners from different disciplines) working on rehabilitation so as to facilitate the discussion of diverse issues (legal and non-legal) that are relevant to understanding its scope as a form of rehabilitation and what is required for its implementation.

Seminar Programme

July 2010

Rethinking Ethical Feminism through Ubuntu

About the speaker:

Drucilla Cornell is the former National Research Foundation Chair in Customary Law, Indigenous Ideals and Dignity Jurisprudence at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and currently is a Professor of Political Science, Women & Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is also a visiting professor at Birkbeck College in London and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Prior to beginning her life as an academic, Cornell was a union organizer for a number of years. From 2003 to the present, she has organized and remains co-director of the uBuntu project in South Africa.

Professor Cornell is an advocate and researcher for Khulumani. She has written numerous articles on contemporary continental thought, critical theory, grass-roots political and legal mobilization, jurisprudence, feminism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy that have appeared in various prestigious journals. She has authored eleven books: Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (1991, new edition 1999), The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (1993), The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (1995), At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (1998), Just Cause: Freedom, Identity, and Rights (2000), Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (2002), Defending Ideals (2004), Moral Imagines of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory (2007), Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity (2009), and, together with Kenneth Michael Panfilio, Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfigurations of Critical Theory (2010), and she edited a number of groundbreaking collections of essays. She is part of a published philosophical exchange with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser entitled Feminist Contentions (1994). Cornell is also a playwright whose plays have been produced internationally.