Anthony Levin, the Director of ARC-UK, is giving a presentation that promises to be fascinating if anyone is going to be near Leeds, UK tomorrow evening.
Here is the information Anthony provided to us:
Location: Leeds, Leeds Townhall
Time: 7pm Thursday 21 June
Who: Amnesty International Leeds
Title: The Marginalia of Human Rights
Abstract – The Marginalia of Human Rights
Amnesty International, Leeds, 21 June 2012
Anthony Levin
This presentation aspires to introduce a human rights marginalia – stories that don’t get told because they exist outside the dominant framework, or are not yet even stories. The eclecticism of my approach begins with the legacy of my family’s experience as post-Holocaust refugees in Europe and Australia in order to ground and explore contemporary issues in refugee trauma and resettlement. I draw on personal, professional and literary narratives by juxtaposing my previous experience as a Human Rights lawyer, my research and writing in Holocaust studies and my current work with refugee survivors of torture in Bradford. I then move into a discussion of seemingly disparate but intersecting human rights issues, such as genital mutilation, the right to housing and access to education. The talk therefore transects a number of rights which may orbit ‘the refugee’ in order to knit (and knot) together a dynamic picture of human rights practice – one in which we adopt an attitude of suspicion towards prevailing trends in human rights discourse, and use that suspicion to critique the mobilization of ‘visibility’ when deciding on what deserves our attention, empathy and resources. In short, we may have to kill some sacred cows in order to witness and do justice to what is unseen.
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Anthony will be generously providing a detailed followup story on the presentation, with photographs if available for the upcoming issue of the ARC Newsletter.
Steven Svoboda
ARC