Where Human Rights Take Place: Spaces of Rights and Responsibilities Beyond Territory
2½-day interdisciplinary workshop; June 17 (afternoon) -19 (early afternoon) 2026 – Nuremberg
Organized within the Cluster of Excellence Transforming Human Rights
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Background
How can human rights be conceptualized in a world shaped by mobility, digital networks, global infrastructures, and planetary environmental crises? Territorial conceptions of space, long central to human rights law and governance, are increasingly challenged by spatial configurations that exceed jurisdictional borders and destabilize established assumptions about responsibility and accountability. While international human rights law remains largely framed around territorial jurisdiction, rights are more and more exercised and harms produced in contexts that elude clear territorial definition.
This workshop stems from the observation that prevailing human rights frameworks insufficiently capture the spatial conditions under which rights are produced, limited, and contested today. It explores how thinking with and through space can contribute to reframing core concepts of human rights, responsibility, and accountability, particularly in contexts where power, agency, risk, and harm are distributed across transnational, socio-technical, and more-than-human configurations.
Workshop Focus
The workshop brings together scholars from human rights research, geography, law, and related social sciences and humanities to engage with contemporary spatial debates that challenge territorially-bounded understandings of rights and responsibility in the human rights context. Rather than treating space as a neutral container, this workshop will build on approaches that conceptualize space as relationally produced, materially and technologically mediated, historically situated, and politically contested.
A central focus lies on key spatial tensions shaping contemporary human rights debates, including, but not limited to, tensions between:
- territorially-bounded jurisdiction and networked or infrastructural forms of power;
- visible sites of legal and political decision-making and the often-invisible infrastructures and technologies, through which rights are shaped and unevenly distributed;
- human-centered legal assumptions and more-than-human constellations of agency.
Topics
Relevant themes include:
- Territorial jurisdiction, extraterritorial obligations, and the spatial limits of human rights law
- Spatial reconfigurations of responsibility and accountability
- Relational, topological, and assemblage-based approaches to rights
- Digital and infrastructural spaces and their implications for human rights
- Migration, borders, and uneven geographies of protection and vulnerability
- Planetary, environmental, and more-than-human perspectives on rights and justice
- Postcolonial and decolonial critiques of spatial orders in human rights governance
- Interfaces between spatial theory, legal concepts, and human rights practice
Keynote Speakers
The workshop will feature keynote lectures by
- Prof. Dr. Irus Braverman (Law/Geography; U Buffalo USA)
- Prof. Dr. Marko Milanović (Law; U Reading UK)
Formats
- Long & short presentations
- Poster contributions
- Alternative & interactive formats
Registration
We are currently in the process of reviewing submissions and finalizing the programme. Registration for the workshop will open in early May 2026. Further information on participation and the final programme will be made available shortly.
Contact
For further information, please contact georg.glasze@fau.de
Prof. Dr. Georg Glasze; Prof. Dr. Dr. Patricia Wiater; Prof. Dr. Sandra Jasper and Prof. Dr. Blake Walker together with a group of MA students of Cultural Geography @ FAU