Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
This series will examine scholarly and institutional efforts to create new national narratives that walk the fine line between before and after, memory and truth, compensation and reconciliation, justice and peace.
The lecture is preceded by a workshop at 10am in the same location. For additional information please access the DLCL site listing here.
Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)
Terrace Room (Room 429)
The Center for the Study of the Novel is pleased to present a discussion of Professor Joseph Slaughter's new book, Human Rights Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Prof. Slaughter (Columbia) will be in conversation with Prof. Saikat Majumdar (Stanford) and Prof. Michael Rubenstein (UC Berkeley) in the Terrace Room of the English Department (Building 460, Room 426) on Friday, November 20th, at 3:30 pm. A reading selection from this book is available as a pdf by email request and in hard copy on the second floor of the English Department, under the grad mailboxes.
Human Rights Inc is, in Simon Gikandi's words, "one of the most intense and intelligent reflections on the relation between the novel and human rights....a model of how students and scholars of literature can respond to the great humanitarian crisis of our time and transform the culture of human rights itself."
Joseph Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His many publications include articles on the narrative foundations of human rights in Human Rights Quarterly, "Humanitarian Reading" in Humanitarianism and Suffering, torture and Latin American literature in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, ethnopsychiatry, Nigerian literature, and globalization in African Writers and Their Readers, colonial narratives of invoice in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, city space and the national allegory in Research in African Literatures, human rights, multiculturalism, and the contemporary Bildungsroman in Politics and Culture, a short story translation of Argentine Elvira Orphée's "Descomedido" in The Southwest Review, as well as a co-authored article on contemporary epistolary fiction and women's rights in Women, Gender, and Human Rights. His essay, "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law," appeared in a special issue on human rights of PMLA (October 2006) and was honored as one of the two best articles published in the journal in 2006-7; another, "The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality," was named a winner in the Interdisciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at UCLA in 2004. He has co-edited a special issue on "Human Rights and Literary Form" of Comparative Literature Studies.
Terrace Room
Margaret Jacks Hall / Building 460
Department of English
Stanford University
In a new Stanford endeavor, FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law has joined with the Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society to launch an interdisciplinary Program on Human Rights. Introducing CDDRL's latest program, Director Larry Diamond noted that "today's human rights interact with a number of other urgent global issues including climate change, immigration, security, women's rights, poverty, and child soldiers" to name but a few. The campus-wide Human Rights Program builds on the work of CDDRL's Program on Global Justice by bridging the normative and the empirical.
The October launch featured an interdisciplinary panel on human rights, "Bridging Theory and Practice", combining the work and insights of Senior Law Lecturer, FSI Senior Fellow and Human Rights Program Coordinator Helen Stacy, who also served as moderator, Political Science Professor Terry L. Karl, Stanford Law School Professor Jenny Martinez, Anthropology Professor Jim Ferguson, and Civil and Environmental Professor Ray Levitt.
Observing that each of the panelists works adeptly across several disciplinary fields, Program Coordinator Helen Stacy noted that "they dynamically cycle between high theory and everyday action in a constant arbitrage between principle and practice."
Invoking the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Jim Ferguson observed that "the world is a dangerous place" and we need to be careful, watchful, vigilant, and realistic. Just as "If you want peace, work for justice," he said, "If you want human rights, work to overcome economic inequalities."
A second session featured Philosophy Professor Debra Satz, Director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, who introduced the new Undergraduate Human Rights Summer Fellowships, which will allow four undergraduates to immerse themselves in a summer-long internship with a leading human rights organization.
A final keynote address by pediatrician Paul H. Wise, the Richard Behrman Professor in Child Health and a core faculty member of the FSI's Stanford Health Policy center, addressed the aspirational, "Between the Concrete and the Clouds: Living Your Human Rights Principles."
Wise's professional life has been devoted to the real human rights of real children by improving child health-care practices and policies in developing countries. Active in child health projects in India, South Africa, and Latin America, Wise spends each summer in an indigenous village in Guatemala, where he teaches and provides needed care at the village clinic.
This talk provides an overview of deliberative democracy projects conducted by the Center for Deliberative Democracy and its partners in China, Northern Ireland, Brazil, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland and other countries as well as on a European-wide basis. The projects all involve scientific random samples deliberating about policy choices and providing the before and after results as an input to policy making. The talk will focus particularly on the challenges of conducting such projects when they are intended as a precursor to further democratization or when there is ethnic conflict.
James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science. He is also Director of Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Chair of the Dept of Communication.
He is the author of a number of books including Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (1991), The Dialogue of Justice (1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (1995). With Bruce Ackerman he is co-author of Deliberation Day (Yale Press, 2004). His new book When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation will be published by Oxford University Press in fall 2009.
He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® - a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Professor Fishkin and his collaborators have conducted Deliberative Polls in the US, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Bulgaria, China, Greece and other countries.
Fishkin has been a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge as well as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Fishkin received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Encina Hall, E102
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University, where he is a Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy). He is also Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab at CDDRL (formerly the Center for Deliberative Democracy).
He is the author of a number of books, including Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (Yale University Press, 1991), The Dialogue of Justice (Yale University Press, 1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (Yale University Press 1995). With Bruce Ackerman, he is the co-author of Deliberation Day (Yale University Press, 2004). And more recently, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford University Press, 2009 and Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2018).
He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® — a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Professor Fishkin and his collaborators have conducted Deliberative Polls in the US, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Bulgaria, China, Greece, Mongolia, Uganda, Tanzania, Brazil, and other countries.
Fishkin has been a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Fishkin received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.
