Research event

Workshop: Frames of European Human Rights - How are climate change, migration, and authoritarianism framed within the Council of Europe?

The workshop is hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation and in collaboration with Helmut Schmidt University.

Human rights set normative standards for states to adhere to – but they also contribute to shaping debates on politically, economically, and socially controversial topics at a deeper level, influencing our understanding of underlying realities, diagnosing problems, and leaving some aspects aside as irrelevant or less important. The aim of this workshop is to explore these constructions of realities and normativities within human rights law, focussing on the frames and framers of climate change, migration and authoritarianism in European human rights.

We invite contributions to critically analyse the emergence or shifts over time of the frames with regard to climate change, migration, and authoritarianism. What are the assumptions and terminology underpinning discussions of authoritarianism in Europe? What understandings of nature and its relation to the economy and human beings accompany discussions of climate change in the Council of Europe context? Along which lines are migrants classified within European human rights law, what kind of language is used to do so, and what gets invisibilised through these classifications? To explore the politics of different actors within the Council of Europe, we also seek to map the multiplicity of framers and how they interact with one another. To which actors can we trace certain frames used to address these topics? How do the vocabularies of various institutional actors within the Council of Europe and those of civil society and of scholarship overlap or conflict, and with what consequences?

The workshop will take place at Hertie School in Berlin on 16 and 17 November 2023 with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation and in collaboration with Helmut Schmidt University. Funds are available to cover economy travel and accommodation costs of workshop participants, where necessary. We invite original submissions as we aim to explore publication options in an edited volume or journal special issue following the workshop.

Please note the call for papers has been closed.

Workshop Organisers

Başak Çalı, Hertie School
Esra Demir-Gürsel, Hertie School
Jens T. Theilen, Helmut Schmidt University