This is a quick reminder that the London Conference on Critical Thought 2012 call for papers is ending on the 19th of Feb. The call for papers is available here and full details of all the streams can be seen here. They are many and varied; dealing with radical political rhetoric, Sovereignty, TextualSpace/Spatial Text, The Object, The Question of the Animal, Egalitarian Emancipation, Zizek and the Political, Marx and Marxism Today, Critical Education, Deleuzian Theory
in Pracitce, Critique of Critical theory, Critical Art, Cosmopolitianism and the City, Law and Culture and Common Life. This the the blurb for my stream.

Critical Human Rights

Human rights tend to generate a fairly self-satisifed and cosy narrative in which they are positioned as the crucial politico-legal position on upholding the dignity, equality and freedom of the human. However, increasingly the responses from critical theory to the discourse are gathering. From Burke’s early critique of their metaphysical pretensions and the marxist attacks on their blatant individualism, we increasingly find a broadening and radicalisation of these critiques (cf. Bloch, Arendt, Foucault, Brown, Agamben, Balibar, Ranciere, Douzinas, Orford). However, with a few notable exceptions, once a critical theorist has repeated or developed their critique, they tend to then dispose of the question of rights in toto. This stream seeks to question whether there is something recoverable in human rights for critical theory? It calls for papers on both critical approaches to human rights, but also radical alternatives to the dominant discourse of international human rights law, particularly the right to the city, the rights of the poor, the right of resistance, etc.

Stream Coordinator: Illan rua Wall (email londoncriticalconference [AT] gmail.com, please insert the title of the stream in the subject of the email)