Rethinking Rights in Times of Crisis: Local and Global Perspectives on Resilience and Dignity

The ubiquitous crises of the early 20th century have been marked by populist forces that, in association with state and nonstate entities, have increasingly normalized violence against our planet’s most vulnerable. We therefore believe it is imperative to cultivate nuanced understandings of resilience, to advocate urgently for a praxis of responsibility and compassion, and to engage critically with mechanisms for respecting the dignity of humans and others, e.g., with structures and the logics of “rights.” This conference will highlight issues that compel us to think about the future of the planet deeply, creatively, conceptually, and contextually.

We look forward to papers, roundtables, and workshops that address issues, trends, developments, and movements that have shaped the discourses of rights, have reimagined ways of being human and of understanding the nonhuman, and have posed challenges to identities, authorities, economies, and constructions of biopolitics and transnationalism.

We welcome submissions from all academic and policy/practice relevant fields that relate to the conference themes.

civil rights conference logo

Keynote Speakers

Nadia Theodore

The Honorable Nadia Theodore

Consul General, Canada

"Human Rights in the 21st Century: A Canadian Perspective"

The Honorable Nadia Theodore is a Government Affairs, International Relations and Communications leader.  She holds a law degree from the University of London, a master's degree in Political Science from Carleton University, and 20+ years of progressive Federal Government experience working on strategic policy, communications, trade and stakeholder affairs at the highest levels of decision making. Ms. Theodore is currently based in Atlanta after being appointed by the Prime Minister of Canada as the Consul General of Canada to the Southeast USA. In this role, she is responsible for strengthening and deepening the Canada-U.S. relationship across her six states of accreditation (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee). 

Consul General Theodore has made advancing inclusion in the workplace a core pillar of her mandate as an executive in the Canadian public service and as Consul General in Atlanta. She is committed to making sure that the public service is included in the global conversation on diversity and inclusion within organizations and the deliberate work to build inclusive teams, including and especially at senior levels. Her frank, relatable and hard-hitting message has made her a sought after speaker in the areas of trade policy, gender equity and leadership

Dr. Wendy Hesford

The Ohio State University

“Gendering Human Rights and Humanitarian Violence at the Border"

Wendy S. Hesford is professor of English and Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy. She has published six books, including the award-winning Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011). Her latest monograph Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics is forthcoming (Ohio State UP, 2020). Her research and teaching are geared toward social justice and critical human rights literacy. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory University School of Law, and Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. She presently directs the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme at Ohio State—a university wide cross-disciplinary initiative.

Wendy Hesford

Featuring a Special Performance by the Igbo Dance Group performing traditional Igbo dances of Nigeria:

Nigerian Igbo female dance group

Performances

The International Summit on Civil and Human Rights features three cultural performances that help illustrate the conference themes, as well as an exhibit that will run the duration of the summit. Each of the artists brings his or her unique perspective on the continuing global struggle for human rights. 

Laurence Sherr

Concert: "Remembering the Silenced Voices of Holocaust Song Creators: Weaving Songs of Resistance and Survival into a New Cello Sonata"

October 28, 2015
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Composer: Laurence Sherr, Kennesaw State University Composer-in-Residence, Professor of Music

 Compelling stories of the creators of the ghetto, concentration camp, and partisan songs used in a new cello sonata by Sherr, illuminated by live performances of the songs and the sonata. Remembering the contributions of these creators, and of the culture that the Nazis slated for extermination, can help us strive for greater understanding, tolerance, and social justice in contemporary society.

  • Laurence Sherr is active as a composer of Holocaust remembrance music, lecturer on Holocaust music topics, producer of remembrance events, and Holocaust music educator. He is the son of a survivor. Performances and lectures have been given in the Czech Republic, Germany, England, Israel, New Zealand, and across North America. The poetry of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs is featured in his compositions Fugitive Footsteps for baritone and chorus and Flame Language for baritone/mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra or chamber ensemble. His most recent work, Sonata for Cello and Piano: Mir zaynen do!, features five Holocaust songs of resistance and survival integrated with newly composed music. This composition is intended to connect performers and audiences to the source songs, and to the lives and circumstances of their creators.

    Sherr’s 2014 dissemination of this work included: a Keynote Address at the Recovering Forbidden Voices international conference in New Zealand, where his Holocaust works were performed seven times; a paper on his composition Flame Language at the Continuities and Ruptures international conference in Leeds, England, where Fugitive Footsteps was performed; and a lecture at the Jewish Museum in Prague. He led a workshop on teaching music and the Holocaust at the 2012 International Conference on Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and his 2011 Prague Holocaust Remembrance Concert was staged under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy. His 2009 concert and educational activities in Germany, produced in collaboration with the children of the generation who persecuted his mother and her family, led to reconciliation and healing. He developed the global-citizenship course Music and the Holocaust at Kennesaw State University (KSU). Through all of this work, his purpose is to foster greater understanding and tolerance.

    Dr. Sherr is Composer-in-Residence and Professor of Music at KSU. Awards include top prizes in the Delius Composition Contest and the composition competition of the Association for the Promotion of New Music in New York City. International performances of his work have been given in Austria, Holland, Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, Canada, and Mexico. He has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, the American Dance Festival, and Hot Springs National Park, among others. The Florida State University doctoral treatise Laurence Sherr: Chamber Music for Flute details his contribution, and CDs released by the Ein-Klang label in Europe and by Capstone Records in the U.S. include his compositions. He received the KSU 2015 Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement.

Play: Night Blooms

October 29, 2015
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Playwright: Margaret Baldwin, Kennesaw State University
Director: Karen Robinson, Kennesaw State University
Featuring KSU theatre and performance studies students, faculty, and guest artist Chris Kayser

Set in Selma during the historic voting rights march in 1965, Night Blooms looks at how families face social change.  Against the backdrop of the racial tensions of the day, Lucille Stafford and her maid Geneva Willis prepare for Lucille’s annual “blooming party” to view her prized night-blooming cereus.  An unexpected guest arrives and changes the lives of two families forever, proving that personal relationships across generations and races are often far more complex than politics. Written by KSU Senior Lecturer Margaret Baldwin and first produced by Horizon Theatre Company in Atlanta, Night Blooms is the winner of the 2011 Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award for best new play by an Atlanta playwright.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it “…an absorbing portrait of a crumbling social structure that articulates multiple points of view while capturing the tentative moral footing of those caught somewhere in- between.” A perfect companion to the film Selma.

  • Margaret Baldwin’s plays and adapted works have been produced throughout the US and abroad. Her play Night Blooms won the 2011 Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award for its world premiere at Horizon Theatre and was produced at Virginia Rep (2012). Night Blooms has had staged readings throughout the US and in Germany and is the focus of Baldwin’s TEDxAtlanta talk, “The Power of Dialogue.” Her new play Coyote Hour was finalist for the 2015 National Playwrights Conference and an honorable mention for The Kilroy’s 2015 list of best new plays by women playwrights. Her most recent project, The Followers, a contemporary retelling of Euripides’ The Bacchae, is in development through a partnership between 7 Stages Theatre and Kennesaw State University. Margaret serves as a Senior Lecturer and General Education Coordinator in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. She is the recipient of the KSU Foundation’s 2014 Distinguished Teaching Award. She holds has an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and is a member of the Playwright’s Center and the Dramatists Guild.
Margaret Baldwin
Karen Robinson

Karen Robinson

Karen Robinson serves as Professor and Artistic Director in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at Kennesaw State University (KSU) where she has taught for sixteen years. She has worked professionally as a director, dramaturg, and/or stage manager in New York, North Carolina, California, and Georgia. Her directing work includes chamber theatre, performance ethnography, contemporary and period classics, and new play development. As an Associate Artist at Georgia Shakespeare, she directed fourteen productions for the company. Recent directing projects include THE COMING OUT MONOLOGUES PROJECT at KSU and MARCUS; OR THE SECRET OF SWEET at Actor's Express in Atlanta. She directed the world premiere of NIGHT BLOOMS for Atlanta's Horizon Theatre Company and a staged reading of the play for Selma, Alabama's commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Marches in March 2015. A passionate advocate for global learning and intercultural art and performance, Karen served as Global Learning Coordinator for KSU’s College of the Arts from 2006-2013.

Her global projects have included tours of student productions to Morocco, China, and Germany. Karen is the recipient of KSU’s 2009 Award for Distinguished Teaching, a 2010 University of Georgia Board of Regents Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the 2011 KSU Distinguished Professor Award.

 

Concert: The Georgia Spiritual Ensemble

October 29, 2015
7:30 pm - 8:00 pm

 The Georgia Spiritual Ensemble sings traditional and arranged choral and solo spirituals that have been popularized throughout the twentieth century. Because of the strong musical legacy the spiritual possesses and the horrific conditions under which it “sprang” into existence, it continues to maintain its original haunting quality and its uncanny beauty and dignity.

Georgia Spiritual Ensemble
Granito: How to Nail a Dictator film cover art

Film Screening: Granito: How to Nail a Dictator

October 30th, 2015
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Discussion Leaders: Drs. Alan LeBaron and Ernesto Silva, Kennesaw State University

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is a story of destinies joined by Guatemala’s past, and how a documentary film intertwined with a nation’s turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present. In Granito our characters sift for clues buried in archives of mind and place and historical memory, seeking to uncover a narrative that could unlock the past and settle matters of life and death in the present. Each of the five main characters whose destinies collide in Granito are connected by Guatemala’s past. In 1982, Guatemala was engulfed in an armed conflict during which a genocidal “scorched earth” campaign by the military killed nearly 200,000 Maya people including 45,000 disappeared. Now, as if a watchful Maya god were weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most, our characters become integral to the overarching narrative of wrongs done and justice sought that they have pieced together, each adding their granito, their tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale.

Exhibit: "Opening Doors, Outing History

October 28th - 30th, 2015
Developed by Jessica Duvall, Assistant Director, LGBTIQ Student Retention Services, Kennesaw State University

A history ex hibit that attempts to queer the idea of public history by utilizing the symbolic importance of the closet within LGBTQ communities and fusing it with conversation of public history and communal knowledge. Discussion of LGBTQ histories are often infrequent and never complete, but this project seeks to engage these discussions in public and to inform those who may otherwise not encounter it. Focusing on the past 65 years, ‘Opening Doors, Outing History’ is a starting point to what will hopefully be a continued conversation on how to make visible and incorporate facets of LGBTQ history and experience into everyday conversation and relevance.

Exhibit: "Opening Doors, Outing History

Themes

Papers, roundtables, and workshop ideas are invited in the following four related areas.

    • Epistemological assumptions
    • Violence in states and movements espousing human rights
    • Structures of accountability within interventions naming human rights goals
    • Legal, ethical, and/or cultural aspects
    • Impacts of technology and social movements, including by extremist populations
    • Geopolitical hegemony
    • Crimes against humanity
    • Migration/immigration
    • New forms of boundary making
    • Under extremist regimes
    • In conflict
    • Human trafficking
    • Truth and reconciliation commissions
    • Traditional media/social media and contemporary conflicts
    • Technonationalisms
    • Rhetoric and representation
    • Emerging Ethno-nationalisms and borders
    • Gender-based violence and extremism
    • Student activism
    • Transnational solidarities
    • Emerging forms of resilience and resistance
    • Gender and sexuality
    • Youth and children
    • “Race” and ethnicity
    • Religion
    • The states of the environment
    • Trends in philosophy, policy, and law
    • Comparative cultural approaches
    • Indigenous perspectives and modes of activism regarding the nonhuman
    • Dispelling stereotypes about Other religions, e.g., strategies for responding to Islamophobia
    • Alleviating interreligious violence
    • Misconceptions about Interfaith
    • Limits of Interfaith
    • Case studies

Schedule

Conference Day 1
Thursday, March 12, 2020 | Prillaman Hall

TIME EVENT LOCATION
8 - 9 a.m.
 Registration Prillaman Hall Lobby
9 - 9:30 a.m. Welcome Address HS2204
9:30 - 10:45 a.m.
 Panels I & II HS 1002 & HS1001
11 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
 Lunch The Commons
2 - 3:15 p.m.
 Keynote Address HS2204
3:30 - 4:45 p.m. Panels III, IV HS 2204, HS 2202
5 - 6:15 p.m.
 Panels V, VI HS 2202, HS 2204

Conference Day 2
Friday, March 13, 2020 | Prillaman Hall

TIME EVENT LOCATION
9 - 10:15 a.m. Panels VII, VIII HS 2010, HS 2202
10:30 - 11:45 a.m. Panels IX, X HS 1103, HS 1105
12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Keynote Address HS 1105
1:30 - 2:30 p.m. Lunch The Commons
2:45 - 4 p.m. Panels XI, XII HS 1103, HS 1105
4 - 5:15 p.m. Panels XIII, XIV HS1103, HS 2202
7 - 10 p.m. Dinner Banquet KSU Center Room 400

DOWNLOAD THE DETAILED CONFERENCE PROGRAM

*Prillaman Hall is located at 520 Parliament Garden Way NW, Kennesaw GA 30144

Call for Papers

Formats For Conference Presentations

Individual Presentations:

These are typically topical presentations for a 15 minute slot. The presenter will prepare a conference paper that will be presented and is typically a more focused, narrower version of their overall project. The conference committee will organize accepted abstracts into sessions based on overlapping themes

The following may take two forms based on the nature and depth of accepted abstracts:

  • These sessions at conference primarily include completed research or scholarly work. The presentations will be grouped by topic or theme into sessions that include several related presentations. This facilitates audience attendance and organizes topics at the conference.
  • Roundtable sessions allow the presenter the opportunity to interact and converse more with the audience. Presenters are assigned to a table in a conference room for the duration of the session and interested attendees may join them at their table. These sessions are typically best for position papers, policy analyses, and other types of topics that benefit from extended discussion time.
  • In panel discussions, two or more speakers will present different aspects, perspectives or thoughts on the topics mentioned above (this may include a research problem or question based on proposed or ongoing research). Each speaker will have an opportunity to present their information and when all the speakers are finished, there is typically time for discussion. Panel conveners may include a discussant. Each speaker in a panel will have maximum 15 minutes. There will be 15 minutes of audience/discussion time at the end.
  • Poster presentations are opportunities for a larger number of researchers to present their research in the form a visual poster presentation. The posters are large (often 3' x 4') and provide the researcher with enough space to fully summarize their research in an attractive and professional way. The presenter typically prepares a short oral summary that can be given to those who are interested. Attendees are free to move about the room and examine posters and talk individually to the presenters. This format does allow the opportunity for a research target those that are genuinely interested and engage them in discussion that often allows for more detail. Another advantage of this type of format is that researcher can receive valuable feedback from the attendees.

  • Workshops are interactive sessions that can vary in length from approximately an hour to half a day. If you have an idea please approach the organizers soon to see if your work-shop better fits in a pre-conference format or within the regular conference schedule. These sessions usually begin with explanatory or introductory information and then move on to involve the audience in some type of

    interactive, participatory activity. Workshops and interactive presentations are particularly well suited for demonstrations, learning new skills or procedures, debates, exhibitions and so forth. Considering the relevance of our theme/s we are interested in submissions in this format.

DOWNLOAD CALL FOR PAPERS

Contact Us

If you have any questions about the conference, please direct them to the humandignity@kennesaw.edu 

You may also contact the conference organizers directly by phone. Their contact information is below.

Name
Position

  • Dr. Nuru Akinyemi

    Director of the Center for African and African Diaspora Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science

    nakinyem@kennesaw.edu
    (470) 578-3346
    ALC 5653

  • Saundra Rogers

    International Project Development Manager

    sroger12@kennesaw.edu
    (470) 578-2429
    ALC 5625 I

  • Professor of English

    odiop1@kennesaw.edu
    (470) 578-2363
    EB 118