College lecturer Dr Birgit Schippers will spend July and August 2016 as a visiting research fellow at the Humboldt University’s Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies in Berlin.
Dr Schippers will utilize the fellowship to examine if posthumanist ideas challenge current thinking on human rights, and if so, how they challenge that thinking. Schippers is particularly interested in feminist interpretations of posthumanist ideas, and she hopes to consider how feminist engagements with posthumanist thought may reconfigure gendered conceptions of human rights. At a later stage of the project, Dr Schippers will investigate how military and surveillance technology deployed in the wake of the war on terror has led to transformations in human rights discourses and practices.
Birgit’s wider research interests lie in the field of international political theory and global ethics. She is currently editing two books, The Routledge Handbook on Rethinking Ethics in International Relations (Routledge) and Critical Perspectives on Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield International).