Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights

Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights

Projects

An overview of our finished and ongoing research projects can be found here (click to expand).

  • http://beucitizen.eu
  • Project leader: Sybe de Vries
  • 2013-2017
  • EU 7th Framework Programme, coordinated by Utrecht University
  • Why don’t Europeans realise their rights as European citizens? This multinational and multidisciplinary project sets out to identify and analyse which impediments hinder European citizens from realising (i.e. being aware of, as well as materialising) these rights and why.

  • www.RobLeurs.com
  • Project leader: Rob Leurs
  • Covering genocide trials’ focuses on how the interaction of journalists, representatives of the victims and representatives of the indicated criminals, from their specific discursive position, circulates meanings that form the basis of the international press coverage of genocide trials in Cambodia, The Netherlands and Rwanda.

  • www.fp7-frame.eu
  • 2013-2017
  • EU 7th Framework Programme in which Utrecht University participates
  • FRAME focuses on the contribution of the EU’s internal and external policies to the promotion of human rights worldwide.

  • http://www.hackinghabitat.com/nl/
  • Project leader: Ine Gevers
  • 2015-2016
  • We humans think we are in control of technology. However, the tables are already turning. Our high-tech environment is gradually taking over. It’s high time to reclaim our living environment: Hacking Habitat! The acclaimed exhibition in the former Utrecht prison makes remote control tangible and, by doing so, emits a powerful opposing force.

  • http://mensenrechten.verdus.nl
  • Project leader: Barbara Oomen
  • 2012-2014
  • Increasingly, cities refer directly to international human rights in formulating local social policies. This research is about investigating the potential of direct reference to these international human rights in formulating urban social and participation policies, catalyzing cooperation between actors and strengthening cosmopolitan urban identities. It looks into ‘human rights cities’ both in- and outside of the Netherlands, seeking to understand the motivations of the actors involved in these processes, the mechanisms of becoming a human rights city and the outcomes of these processes.

  • www.utrechtmemorystudies.nl/nitmes
  • Project leader: Ann Rigney
  • 2012-2015
  • Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
  • The purpose of NITMES (Network in Transnational Memory Studies)  is to find new ways of conceptualising and studying cultural memory beyond the framework of the nation-state so as to provide tools for understanding identity and heritage that are better fitted to the entanglements of the contemporary world.

  • www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch/Actions/IS1307
  • Project leader: Iris van der Tuin
  • 2014-2018
  • COST Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)
  • Utrecht University hosts the COST Action New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on How Matter Comes to Matter. One of its working groups (New Materialisms Tackling Economical and Identity-Political Crises and Organizational Experiments) is explicitly linked to the focus area CCHR.

    • As part of the exhibition Peace of cake? (2013), short documentaries were made in which Prof. Rosemarie Buikema and other experts shared findings of their research into peace and reconciliation. The exhibition zoomed in on three (former) war zones: Uganda, South Africa and Yugoslavia.
    • Watch the video with Rosemarie Buikema on peace and reconciliation in South Africa:

  • www.postcolonialstudies.nl
  • Project leader: Sandra Ponzanesi
  • The Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) at Utrecht University is intended as a platform for research into postcolonial issues, specifically focused on their application within Europe. The PCI organises activities such as lectures, film series, masterclasses and seminars, striving for greater interaction with society at large.

  • Project leader: Leonard Rutgers
  • By comparing new evidence bearing on selected Jewish communities in Italy, Egypt, and the Near East from 200-700 C.E. this project seeks to transcend the classical notion of Diaspora, as it deals with the issue of the interrelationship between religion, language change, societal marginalisation, and migration.

  • www.icafrotterdam.com
  • Project leader: Eugene van Erven
  • A joint venture between university, the community arts sector and the city, which includes a so-called ‘Sharing Arts Lab’ (SAL) that includes the minor creative cities and a number of collaborative research practices intent on generating knowledge and methods about possible connections between participating in the arts and in society. SAL also has direct links to a worldwide network of artists and scholars through the International Community Arts Festival.

  • https://keilbach.wordpress.com/research/
  • Project leader: Judith Keilbach
  • This research project approaches the Eichmann trial from a media-historical perspective. Drawing on archival records, interviews, and television programs of different countries it discusses the technical and institutional preconditions of the television coverage as well as the programs’ content. It focuses on the various transnational co-operations, the technical and institutional contentions, and the political contexts to understand the differences between the television programs as well as the changing media landscape of the early 1960s.

  • www.terracritica.net
  • Project leaders: Birgit Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele
  • An international research network in the humanities, bringing together scholars specializing in critical and cultural theory. Its aim is to reexamine critical theory and critique under the conditions of the 21st century – given our immanent, terran existences, globally entangled across flows of capital, people, and ideas and living in ecological and economical multidependences.

  • Project leader: Jos Philips
  • This project aims to investigate whether human rights can be reconstructed as a discourse of basic justice, and an attractive one, which can appropriately take into account global and intergenerational dimensions.

  • Project leader: Doro Wiese
  • This research aims to address forms of untranslatability in the highly acclaimed and globally circulating oeuvres of American Indian authors Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday and James Welch. In particular, this research will explore how their fictional configurations of time and space remain incommensurable for Western readers.

  • www.urbaninterfaces.net
  • Project leader: Nanna Verhoeff
  • Urban Interfaces is a platform for the critical investigation of the city as interface for creativity and civic engagement at the crossing of academic research and cultural practices. Focussing on mobile and situated media, arts, and performances, the platform delivers critical reflections on and actual interventions in these socio-spatial activities and their shaping and staging of urban culture.

  • Project leader: Ido de Haan
  • Who is entitled to the provisions of the welfare state? All who need it, those who paid for it, or only our own people? How is citizenship of the welfare state connected to membership of the nation, historically, empirically, normatively?