Hosted by Brunel University London’s Global Lives Research Centre, Knowing Our Rights research project, and Britain in Europe think tank – and convened by Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos (Brunel University) and Meredith Jones (Brunel University) – The Body and Human Rights Symposium is a cross-disciplinary colloquium taking place at Friends House in Euston on the 12th February.
In recent decades the body has become a major area of research across many disciplines, especially in the arts and social sciences. Feminist scholars have made important interventions in the ways that bodies are represented, managed, regulated, treated medically, and modified. Simultaneously, human rights scholars have engaged with challenging questions of how the human body should be legally understood and defined, and what may legitimate the State to become involved with individual choices about what to do with one’s body (or how individuals might protect their autonomy from state invasions). This symposium will draw together these two areas.