The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas School of Law announces the start to its Spring 2014 colloquium on "Comparing European and North American Approaches to Human Rights." The six-part speaker series begins Monday, Feb. 3, with talks on counter-terrorism by law professors Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, from the University of Minnesota Law School and University of Ulster, and Aziz Rana, from Cornell Law School.  

 

Each of the six events this spring will feature two speakers, one from Europe and one from North America. They will examine the way in which both regions engage with some of today's most pressing human rights issues.

 

April 7: "Approaches to Universal Jurisdiction"

• Juan Garcés, Spanish Attorney, Lead Counsel in criminal case against Augusto Pinochet in Spain
• Michael Tigar, Emeritus Professor of the Practice of Law, Duke Law School, and Professor Emeritus of Law, Washington College of Law, American University

April 21: "Approaches to Labor Rights"

• Mitchel Lasser, Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law and Director of Graduate Studies, Cornell Law School
• Kerry Rittich, Professor, Faculty of Law and the Women's and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto

The colloquium is organized by the Rapoport Center with the support of the Center for European Studies and other co-sponsors, and is funded in part by a grant from the European Union. All talks are free and open to the public and light refreshments will be served. Details can be found on the Rapoprt Center's website. Presentations take place at 3:45 p.m. in the law school's Sheffield Room (TNH 2.111) unless noted otherwise.

 

For more information contact, William Chandler, Rapoport Center, at 512-232-4857 or humanrights@law.utexas.edu.

Belo Media Center (BMC) 5.102

 

The conference is free and open to the public but registration is greatly appreciated.

Click here to register.

 

This conference seeks to advance the understanding of today's European citizenship. And it does so in a particular way as it takes up the challenge to explore the role of the mass media and people's interpersonal discussion habits about politics in explaining civic and political participatory behaviors that foster a European citizenship.  

 

For years researchers have inquired about the mechanisms that elicit today's European Union. There seems to be a consensus in the academic community that points to certain aspects as being central for the advancement of the European Union. Social identity features, cultural traits, a strong and deliberative public sphere, and sociopolitical elements have all been theorized to provide a healthier, more cohesive, and more participatory European Union.

 

Nevertheless, how Europeans participate and get involved in the political process is largely mediated, and it has been somewhat overlooked. That is, the ways in which European citizens engage in civic and political activities greatly depend on the effects of the mass media and the ways in which citizens discuss important public issues among themselves. Hence, the importance of studying the role of the mass media and how people discuss relevant issues for public life, perhaps generating a European public sphere.

 

Drawing from the expertise provided by academics, professionals, and media experts from the USA, the European Union, and Latin America, this conference aims to shed light over all these processes as they shape today's European Citizenship.

 

For a full schedule and list of presenters, please visit the CES website.

 

Northern Ireland was the site of bitter conflict between those struggling for reunification with the rest of Ireland and those wanting to remain a part of the United Kingdom. After years of strenuous negotiations, nationalists and unionists came together in 1998 to sign the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland's peace process has been deemed largely successful. Yet remarkably little has been done to assess in a comprehensive fashion what can be learned from it.

 

Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process incorporates recent research that emphasizes the need for civil society and a grassroots approach to peacebuilding while taking into account a variety of perspectives. The contributions, which include the reflections of those involved in the negotiation and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, also provide policy prescriptions for modern conflicts.

 

Sponsored by International Relations and Global Studies, the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, the UT Department of Government, and the Center for European Studies/EU Center of Excellence

The May 15th movement of 2011 has inspired a spate of recent films made by both Spaniards and non-Spaniards, established filmmakers and video activists alike. These films, while sympathetic to the movement, hinge on an apparent paradox: they are cultural representations that purport to offer a critique of political representation. This paper turns on the performative implications of that paradox and seeks to establish an argument regarding "performance" as the key element that links and interrogates political representation, cultural representation, the changes in the technologies of filmmaking, and militant politics.  

 

Drawing on Derrida's theoretization of the performative this paper argues that the filmic texts analyzed - among them, Libre te quiero(Basilio Martín Patino 2012), Vers Madrid, The Burning Bright (Sylvain George 2012), Banderas falsas and Falsos horizontes (Carlos Serrano Azcona 2012), and Flavio G. Garcia's "Video Derives"  - constitute political acts in their own right; that is, rather than "representations" they perform their own politics. Accordingly, it posits a relation between formal abstraction (as antinomic of representation) and militant politics.   

 

While locating these recent productions within a counter-tradition of political cinema of the Spanish state, this paper also seeks to complicate their historical antecedents and their supposedly national affiliation.

 

Steven Marsh is Associate Professor of Spanish film and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Hispanic & Italian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is joint editor of Gender and Spanish Cinema(Berg 2004) and the author of Popular Spanish Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (Palgrave 2006). He is the editor of the forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies on spectrality and Spanish film and he is in the process of finalizing a new monograph provisionally titled Spanish Cinema, A Counterhistory:  Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy.

 

Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

  

In his influential Introduction to Documentary (2001), Bill Nichols outlines six documentary modes of representation "that function something like sub-genres of the documentary film genre itself: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, performative" (99). These categories are useful starting points for classification, but from the beginning documentary film has always mixed modes of address, styles and forms. Indeed, the genre's beginnings lie in the efforts of its first practitioners to explore the limits of the cinema itself, as they worked to discover "new possibilities and untried forms" (Nichols 82). Early filmmakers' experimentation with cinematic techniques accordingly "blurred boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, documenting reality and experimenting with form, showing and telling, narrative and rhetoric" (Nichols 83).     

           

This talk will analyze how contemporary Iberian documentary filmmakers have continued this tradition, melding modes of representation in order to critique, observe or otherwise erode traditional boundaries between reality and fiction, showing and telling, narrative and testimony, realism and formalism in their films. The lecture will analyze three works emerging from three different corners of Iberia that in one way or another question the "rhetorics of authenticity" upon which traditional documentary films have relied: from Catalonia, Todos vós sodes capitáns (Oliver Laxe, 2010), a poetic film about globalism and social issues that also problematizes the ability of European cameras to document the social reality of non-European Others; from Portugal, Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (Miguel Gomes, 2008), an observational film about Portuguese regional identities that also contains within itself a parallel narrative about the making of a "fictional" film-within-the-film; and, emerging from and engaging parodically with a variety of Castilian cultural traditions, Cámara lúcida (Carlos Cañeque, 2013), a reflexive, participatory postmodern documentary exploring the uncertain boundaries between reality and fiction, tradition and innovation, audiovisual and literary culture in contemporary Spain.

 

Samuel Amago, Associate Professor of Spanish & Associate Chair, Department of Romance Languages, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 

Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Nineteen fourteen marked the beginning of a new Thirty Years' War in Europe. The meaning of modernity changed: it no longer designated material and human progress but industrial killing and anonymous mass death. Between 1914 and 1945, "hot," extreme, passionate and uncontrolled violence merged with the "cold" and rationally planned violence of modernity, carried on by technological and industrial means. Both literature and visual arts mirrored this peculiar disruptive tension. Distinguished scholar and Cornell University professor Enzo Traverso reassesses the concept of "European civil war," discussing its virtues and limits, its uses and abuses. 

 

Sponsored by the Center for European Studies/European Union Center of Excellence, the Cultural Service at the Consulate General of France in Houston, the Department of History, the Institute for Historical Studies, the France-UT Institute, the Harry Ransom Center, and, above all, the French Embassy in Washington DC.

 

For more information, please visit the CES website.