Contact Kimberley Brownlee for more information.
This conference aims to bring together leading philosophers of human rights and rising stars to present frontier work on themes related to social rights, including the conceptual terrain, the place of social rights within the standard dichotomy between so‐called 'liberty rights' and 'welfare rights', the defensibility of social rights as human rights, their relevance to distributive justice issues such as equality of opportunity, and their bearing on other branches of political philosophy such as democratic theory. The conference aims both to expand human rights theory and to set an agenda for further research.
We invite submissions between 5,000 – 8,000 words from early career scholars and PhD students to fill a select number of speaker slots at this conference. We anticipate that two to four papers will be accepted. (For the purposes of this Call, 'early career scholars' are scholars within five years of their PhD. Permanent post-holders are eligible to apply.) The deadline is 1 March 2019.
In debates about human rights, philosophers have tended to neglect social rights (i.e. the rights that protect our interpersonal, associative, and community-membership needs irrespective of our economic or political circumstances). Philosophers have focused instead on a familiar list of 'first generation' civil and political rights as well as a subset of the so-called 'second generation' socio-economic rights, namely the economic-welfare rights to shelter, basic subsistence, health, and education.
This conference aims to bring together leading philosophers of human rights and rising stars to present frontier work on themes related to social rights, including the conceptual terrain, the place of social rights within the standard dichotomy between so-called 'liberty rights' and 'welfare rights', the defensibility of social rights as human rights, their relevance to distributive justice issues such as equality of opportunity, and their bearing on other branches of political philosophy such as democratic theory. The conference aims both to expand human rights theory and to set an agenda for further research.
Submissions must be anonymized. We expect to inform applicants of the results by 31 March 2019.
A selection of the papers presented at the conference will be compiled for publication. In submitting a paper, the author agrees that the paper will be considered for inclusion in the network's publication plans. While we expect to publish the accepted papers, each paper will be refereed for the publication, and publication is not guaranteed.
Papers are to be submitted here.
Registration details will follow in due course. The conference is open to the public, but registration is required. Please forward this Call for Submissions to any PhD students and early career scholars you know who might be interested in submitting a paper for the conference.
For their support of this event, we thank the Aristotelian Society, Mind Association, Society for Applied Philosophy, and Warwick Philosophy Department.