Humanity Editorial Transition

The founding editorial collective of Humanity—Nehal Bhuta, Nils Gilman, Nicolas Guilhot, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, and Miriam Ticktin—is pleased to announce that, after ten years, its members are stepping down. To take the journal into the future, a new editorial collective has formed. Our transition has already begun, and the official switchover from one collective to the other takes place in the new year. We congratulate and welcome the members of the new editorial collective, who are already open to contact and open for consultation:

Ayça Çubukçu is (from fall 2018) associate professor in human rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the codirector of LSE Human Rights. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (Pennsylvania, 2018) and a number of articles which have appeared in the London Review of International Law, Journal of Human Rights, Law, Culture and the HumanitiesInterventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and parallax. Before coming to LSE, Çubukçu taught for the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and the Committee for Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. She co-edits Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page and is the co-editor of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.

Tobias Kelly is professor of political and legal anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He has carried out ethnographic and archival research in Israel/Palestine, the United Kingdom, and at the United Nations. He has published two monographs: Law, Violence and Sovereignty Amongst West Bank Palestinians (Cambridge, 2006) and This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture and the Recognition of Cruelty (Pennsylvania, 2012). He is currently working on two separate projects. The first examines the relationship between violence, poverty, and human rights activism. The second looks at claims of conscience and their role in the history of human rights and humanitarianism. He received a doctorate in anthropology from the London School of Economics, and has worked at the Institute of Law of Birzeit University, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University.

Angela Naimou is associate professor of English at Clemson University. She received her doctorate in English from Cornell University, where she was a Mellon Graduate Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and won the Dean’s Prize for Distinguished Teaching. She is the author of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham, 2015), which won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize for outstanding contribution to the study of the contemporary arts and was a finalist for the William Sanders Scarborough Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture of any period. Her current book project, tentatively titled Refugee Futurity: Global Forms of Refuge and Refusal, examines how refugee and diasporic writings reconceptualize contemporary practices of migration, refuge, and asylum.

Vasuki Nesiah is a legal scholar who teaches at the Gallatin School, New York University. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, international feminisms and colonial legal history. Her three primary research projects include one that is focused on the politics of race and international criminal law history, another analyzing debates regarding reparations for colonialism and slavery and a project on international feminisms and war/conflict. Her recent publications include a co-edited volume, A Global History of Bandung and Critical Traditions in International Law (Cambridge, 2017) and articles such as “Indebted: The Cruel Optimism of Leaning-in to Empowerment” in Janet Halley et. al, eds., Governance Feminisms (Minnesota, 2018), and “The Escher Human Rights Elevator: Technologies of the Local,” in Sally Engle Merry and Tine Destrooper, eds., Human Rights Transformation in an Unequal World, (Pennsylvania, 2018). She has been core faculty in Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) since 2010. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she has also continued as an active participant in this global scholars’ network for over two decades. She is from Colombo, Sri Lanka and Brooklyn, United States.

Timothy Nunan is a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter and Freigeist fellow at the Center for Global History of the Free University of Berlin. His work focuses on the history of Russia and Eurasia–Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan–in an international context. He is the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2016), and his present project explores the encounter between the Soviet Union and the international socialist movement with Islamism during the Cold War. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Jessica Whyte is senior lecturer in cultural and social analysis at the University of Western Sydney, Australia and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political theory, intellectual history and political economy to analyze contemporary forms of sovereignty, and governmentality. She has a particular interest in the political stakes of mobilizing the category of the human, and in the way claims to protect humanity are bound up with rationalizations for abandoning certain lives and for state-sanctioned killing. She has published widely on human rights, humanitarianism, and neoliberalism, and on contemporary European philosophy. Her first monograph was Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY, 2013). Her forthcoming book, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, will be published by Verso in 2019. She is currently working on a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project, “Inventing Collateral Damage: The Changing Moral Economy of War,” which aims to provide a novel philosophical account of the invention of the discourse of collateral damage.

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One thought on “Humanity Editorial Transition

  • Kazim Abidi

    I WANT TO WRITE A DISSERTATION OR MPhil on Sociology Historiography of Human Rights. I live in London; Can you recommend anyone in the field.
    I am proposing that scholarship and human rights have a single origin.
    Plesse email me. Thanks.
    My proposal is below but you dont have to read it.
    I propose to analyse, study and develop an understanding of the connection between the practice of history/sociology and Human Rights. I want to examine the relationship on two levels: an indirect contribution or a direct contribution to human rights.

    I will start by tracking the course of the craft/historiography in recent history and showing its close relationship with sociology. I will illustrate the contemporaneity of history. From this and the acknowledged dynamism of sociology I will build the case of the necessity of the ‘existent’ that is the fundamental shaping force of humanity and humanities and science brought about by the mode and study of both subjects. Also to illustrate their independence in many ways outside conscious action.
    Following this illustration of function and Being, I will then try and introduce Human Rights, the evolution, presence and history of the ethics of society. I want to show the dialogue between human rights and sociology and present-day human consciousness.
    Although it is quite open that historical change and Rights are quite closely connected I will try to show how a subject needs to reinvent itself to anchor change- self and Other. Some of the trends are in place to support and actualise historical change and the societal such that the mechanical set-up of a text itself lends itself to change in society. A text acknowledges support for change but new trends guide change as well as demanding change. This means how we see ourselves is apparent in two ways, through direct intellectual demand and Being/history, that is the invisible structure of text which is imbued with humanitarian change. Ethics is a structure and a ready-made text, available for change and growth- an enlightened-norm, a basic everyday thought. There is then 1. a canvass and 2. a craft/ debate that supports and breathes life into the world. The argument then is that just because history/ sociology is not scientific or a philosophical thing per se it does provide humankind with the apparatus for change and understanding- Im am not playing on the terms ‘social science’ I am implying that there is an intellectual bedrock that these subjects work in which outside science and art. I want to align historical change, in structure, with history and awareness and humanitarian change. Society and social science and humanitarian studies will all be addressed in this debate. I want to look at structure per se of the way historical essays present themselves, what components of a text are always changing, what components are new, what the writer changes and introduces, style and message.
    I will look at Humanitarianism, Human Rights and who practices it and creates it, how it is studied by those that practice it. How it is received and moulded by society. How human right has evolved and developed and metamorphosed; how it functions in a private and public realm. Human rights in nations, cities, villages and AT HOME, society and family. Those that facilitate it and necessitate it. How it enters in different historical paradigms.
    There are many routes to solve this question of human rights; I will try and address them all such that people can understand the relationship between history/sociology (particularly as a working art) and Human Rights.

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