PhD | Human Rights Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Implications of a Critique of Anthropocentrism for the Idea of Human Rights

PhD-Candidate: Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp | ASCA, UvA | 2020-2024 | Prof. Yolande Jansen/ Prof. Huub Dijstelbloem

This project analyzes the moral and political foundations of human rights from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Human rights rely on a modernist and humanist normative framework that derives humans’ specific dignity from their being ‘human’ in contrast to nature. This framework and the nature/culture divide it relies on have been thoroughly criticized as being anthropocentric over the last decades, from science studies, ecological, posthumanist and decolonial perspectives alike. The implications of this critique for human rights, however, and for the concept of ‘human’ that they rely on, have been relatively understudied so far. This project fills this gap and thinks through the consequences of the critique of anthropocentrism for human rights. At the same time, it remains aware of, and careful with, the normative power of universal rights in practice. It analyzes how recent approaches to the foundations of human rights can respond to the challenge of the non-anthropocentric perspective that has been developed by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. While these authors retheorize the nature/culture divide while concentrating on human-nonhuman relations, this project theorizes the implications of their non-anthropocentric perspective for human-human relations, universal ethical principles and the ‘human’ of human rights. The relatively separate debates on the Anthropocene and on human rights are brought together in order to rethink the conceptual space in which humans and non-humans can be brought into fruitful reciprocal relations of responsibility towards each other.