In the decade or so since human rights literary studies emerged as a subfield, important new areas responsive to the changing times have called for attention in scholarly and community organizing spaces. These include Black led abolition studies, environmental and climate justice studies, critical trauma studies, and decolonial Indigenous land-based relational practices and knowledges.  

This seminar calls for critical reflection on the ways that human rights humanities approaches, texts, and practices are adjacent to, contiguous with, or disjunct from the above areas of scholarly, creative, and activist engagement. 

Might intersection of adjacent subfields open onto new questions and, if so, what kinds?    Are there areas where the kinds of questions each subfield or knowledge body asks may be incommensurable with those of human rights literary studies?   The seminar organizers invite responses to these and other related questions via reflection on theoretical, textual, pedagogical, creative, or activist scholarship and practices.