Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Integrative Research Institute Law & Society (LSI)

In this Werkstattgespräch a number of methodological questions regarding ethnographic methods in the study of the law can be discussed on the base of a concrete case of a popular movement's use of human rights. Legal Anthropology has a long history of addressing „human rights". I want to take scholarly attempts to „re-invent" human rights as an entry point to discuss questions regarding ethnographic modes of inquiry, theory, academic knowledge production and politics. Building on but also aiming to „go beyond" the critique of human rights, different accounts in legal theory and anthropology have proclaimed it an urgent academic and political task to build a new understanding of human rights, different to the dominant liberal one. Often these accounts in some way or another refer to the knowledge and practices of non-dominant (collective) actors as a source for these re-invented rights. By critically interrogating this literature and presenting examples from my own ethnographic fieldwork, methods and methodological questions for the anthropological study of law come center-stage. 

Annette Mehlhorn is currently a researcher in the project “Rights of Nature without Biocultural rights? – Investigating the conflicting dimensions of ecocentrism”, operating under the umbrella of the Max Planck Fellow Group “Environmental Rights in Cultural Context” (ERCC).

Prior to her current position she worked e.g. as a lecturer at Lüneburg University, as assistant professor/DAAD Fachlektorin for Sociology at the State University Saint Petersburg and as head for a project on non-dominant knowledge production in Stuttgart, Germany.

This event is part of the series Werkstattgespräche: Nichtjuristische Zugänge und Methoden zur Erforschung des Rechts.