Education or Justification?: Language and the End of Rights

The Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series on Language Discrimination in Fragile Communities and the FOCUS Program are pleased to present:

Education or Justification?: Language and the End of Rights

Featuring:
Aaron G. Colston, Ph.D (Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow, Linguistics & Cultural Anthropology, Instructor, Program in Education, Duke University)

Dispute over the scope of rights-who has them, who does not, and to what "end"-is as much a problem of the struggle for power as it is about structures of discourse itself. This talk discusses theorists of language and education-among them Richard Rorty, Paulo Freire, and Bob Moses-to raise two questions: why throw in "rights" to justify power, if only to throw them out again? How do we "bring rights back in"?

It will take place on Thursday, October 27th at 5:30 pm in 217 Perkins Library.

Please invite your colleagues and students. We look forward to seeing you there!