New Forms of Human Rights and Civil Activity in the 21st Century

The so-called human rights are first of all civil rights, which means that they are neither universal, nor firm or everlasting. Their formulation is subject to a constant redefinition and renegotiation between the active members of the civil society.

With the participation of: Barbara Duden (Hanover University, Germany); Dimitry Kochenov (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Holland); Ivan Krastev (Center for Liberal Strategies, Bulgaria); Miglena Todorova and Rastko Mocnik (Ljubljana University, Slovenia), along with 50 young people from Central and Eastern Europe to discuss these issues.

More information about the participants and topics:
Barbara Duden
Workshop topic: Gender studies, history and perception of the body
She was born in 1942. She studied History and English philology in the 70-ties in Vienna and Berlin. In that time she had co-founded the Women's journal "Courage". 1986 Barbara Duden received her PhD from The Institute for Newer History in the Technical University in Berlin. Duden is one of the pioneers in the field of History of the human body. Her writings have had a great impact in legitimizing the human body as a research object in the field of history. She has lectured on History of Women and History of Science and Technologies in different universities in USA between 1985-1990. Prof. Duden has also worked at the Institute for Empirical culture studies in Tubingen, Germany. In 1994 she wrote her habilitation thesis on the grafical reprsentation of the unborn between 1492 - 1799. Her most important themes are: perception of the Body, disembodiment through modern medicine, and women's bodies as a public space.
Prof. Duden is also engaged in debates on genetics and biomedicine from a feminist perspective. Her scientific and teaching interests are Sociology of culture, Society and Culture History of the Women's and Gender Studies, and Medicine History.

More information (in German) at http://www.gps.uni-hannover.de/gender/DUDENneu.htm

Dr. Dimitry Kochenov
Workshop topic: New EU non-discrimination legislation developments
Dimitry Kochenov is a lecturer (Universitair docent) in European Law at the Department of European and Economic Law, Faculty of Law, Groningen University.
His main research focus lies with the EU external relations law, with a particular emphasis on the regulation of accessions; EU citizenship; human rights law; EU non-discrimination law; the law of minority protection; as well as broader issues of democracy and the Rule of Law.
Dr. Kochenov holds LL.M. in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest and LL.D. from Groningen, which he was awarded for a thesis on ‘The Failure of Conditionality. Pre-Accession Conditionality in the Fields of Democracy and the Rule of Law’ written under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Laurence W. Gormley and Prof. Dr. Fabian Amtenbrink (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). Before coming to Hungary and the Netherlands he read law and modern languages in the Russian Federation, graduating with degrees in law and in arts. During his studies Dr. Kochenov participated in different programmes including studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) Faculty of Law; studies at Universite Pierre-Mendes France, Grenoble and at the Democracy and Diversity Institute of the New School University , Graduate School for Political Science.

More information (in English) at http://www.rug.nl/staff/d.kochenov/cv

Prof. Miglena Todorova
Workshop topic: New Media – Participation Culture
Miglena Todorova is a Professor in American Studies, who specializes in interdisciplinary and “post-nationalist” studies of 20th century American and world history. Todorova’s training and research incorporate theory and method across history, sociology and cultural studies. She is especially interested in the “globalization” of American media culture and capital. She has lived and worked in the United States since 1992, where she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. There, she also conducted research and taught university classes on U.S. culture and politics in the world in the American Studies department and content-based English composition classes in the Department of English Language and Literature. Prof. Todorova returned to Bulgaria in the spring of 2007. Since the fall of the same year, she has worked as an expert in international relations at the Bulgarian National Radio. Prof. Todorova will resume teaching in the 2008 academic year. She will teach a class on media and globalization and a class on academic writing in the European Studies Department at the Sofia University.
Her last publications include “Imagining ‘In-between’ Peoples Across the Atlantic,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 19, No 4, December 2006“ and “I Don’t Know My Color, but I Do Know My Politics,” Chapter 9 in Hoku Aikau, Karla Erickson and Jennifer Pierce, eds. Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.)

Ivan Krastev
Workshop topic: The Voter, The Citizen ant the Consumer - the new contraversy around the politics of human rights
Ivan Krastev is a political scientist and Chair of Board of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Since 2004 Mr. Krastev has been the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans chaired by the former Italian Premier Minister Giuliano Amato. He is the Director of the Open Century Project of the Central European University in Budapest.In 2006 Ivan Krastev was awarded membership in the Forum of Young Global Leaders, a partner organization of the World Economic Forum. His latest book in English is: Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption, CEU Press, 2004. The book The Anti-American Century edited by Alan McPpherson and Ivan Krastev is forthcoming in 2006 by CEU Press. Ivan Krastev is the Editor in Chief of the Bulgarian edition of Foreign Policy.

More information at http://www.cls-sofia.org/cgi-bin/public/index.cgi?lang=1&topic=users&id=2

Rastko Mochnik
Workshop topic: Social Rights in the Globalization Era
He teaches Theory of Discourse and Epistemology of the Humanities at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. Graduated from the University of Ljubljana in Sociology and Comparative Literature in 1968. Studied semiotics from 1969 – 1975 at l’Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, later Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (Paris), with Algirdas J. Greimas. Obtained doctorat du troisieme cycle in linguistics - literary semiotics at the Universite de Paris X (Nanterre). In 1983, doctorate in sociology from the University of Ljubljana. Post-doctoral Fulbright fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley,1985. 1987-89 vice-rector of the University of Ljubljana - as the result of a campaign which led to the first fair and open election of the University leadership under the regime of the time.
Recent publications:
- "Altercations" (essays on "totalitarianism”, the "alternative”, nationalism; Belgrade, 1998, in Serbian);
- " How Much Fascism?" (essays on post-communist politics, Zagreb, 1998, in Croatian);
- "Theory for Our Times. Levi-Strauss, Mauss, Durkheim - a study in three retroactive movements (Skopje, 1999, in Macedonian);
- "Three Theories - Ideology, Nation, Institution - a rationalised presentation of respective theories and their mutual articulation" (cf., Ljubljana, 1999, in Slovenian);
- "Encounters: histories, transitions, beliefs – essays on the theory of institution, nation, media, contemporary speech-practices, artistic practices and film" (Sofia, 200, in Bulgarian)

More informaion about the event (in English): http://asssu.eu/sites/rodina.zaedno.net/files/u8/CVMocnik.pdf

In English, with simultaneous interpretation in Bulgarian.

May 12 (Monday) 2008, 6.30 p.m.
Red hall
Tickets : 2/1 BGN

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