5th International Conference The Age of Rights
Valladolid, 5-6 November 2018
Call for Communications to the panel on “Human Rights Research Methodologies”
It is now open the submission of communications for the 5th International Conference of the Spanish Human Rights network El Tiempo de los Derechos (the Age of Rights), which will be held in Valladolid the 5th and 6th November 2018.
The panel on “Human Rights Research Methodologies” coordinated by the Human Rights Institute of the University of Deusto (Bilbao) is now calling for communications in either English or Spanish.
The panel will have three invited papers and a discussion paper of received communications (see the programme here). Chosen communications will be invited for a special issue of the Age of Human Rights Journal (December 2019) on the topic of Human Rights Research Methodologies. Please notice that the Conference is in Spanish only; the TAHRJ on the other hand is a publication in English. Communications in Spanish, if accepted, will have to be resubmitted in English for publication.
Registration to the conference is free at 5congreso@redtiempodelosderechos.com. Registration deadline is 31st October 2018.
If you have any queries, please contact dolores.morondo@deusto.es
Rules for the submission of communications:
- Only original communications, which have not been already published, will be accepted.
- Communications have to be submitted in Word format, Times New Roman 12, lenght between 8.000 and 12.000 words, including footnotes.
- Please include an abstract (c. 150 words) and provide 3-7 keywords .
- Communications will be submited by e.mail to the following address: 5congreso@redtiempodelosderechos.com.
- In the e.mail subject please state Metodologías de investigación en derechos humanos.
- Submission deadline is 10th October 2018.
- Communications will be reviewed and notification of acceptance will follow by 17th October.
Concept note for the panel:
Today, it seems to be peacefully accepted that human rights are no longer the exclusive domain of public international law scholars. The growing interest that human rights have aroused to scholars of other disciplines since the late 1980s has surely enriched our knowledge in many ways and has also posed new challenges. Among these, one of the most important is surely the methodological question. If what we can and want to know about human rights is no longer limited to the knowledge and understanding of the international norms that establish them, to the analysis of the texts in which they are collected and to the functioning of the international organisms in charge of monitoring their compliance by the States, we will logically need means to answer different questions.
This session aims to open and disseminate the idea of a textbook on research methodologies in human rights (in preparation) that addresses the methodological question from three main premises. The first - and most important - is that human rights are complex objects of study that, unlike other, do not lend themselves satisfactorily to mono- disciplinary approaches. If we want to use different methods or use results produced with methods different from our own, it is necessary to reflect on interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity in our research. This is a very under-considered aspect (with some recent exceptions, Andreasen et al., 2017, Coomans et al., 2015), which is usually resolved on the basis of juxtapositions. The second and third premises delve into the need to investigate the methodological implications of two issues that, in our opinion, mark the current condition of human rights research. On the one hand, we highlight the role of critical theories and approaches in the study of human rights as that optic that would allow us to understand rights, according to the Bobbian adage, as a result of "new struggles against old powers". On the other hand, we need to account for the confluence in human rights research of academia and activists, the thin line that separates them at times, the differences between their approaches and methods to "know" human rights and the possibilities and potential of their collaboration.
To these three premises, which are the red threads of the book in preparation and of the panel, we will dedicate the papers. We entrust communications with the task of showing the widest possible panorama of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, methods and techniques that we use today in the production of knowledge about human rights.
