The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series presents:
“Impending Freedom: Palestine after the Human”
Dr. Layal Ftouni
WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday April 1, 2026
12-1pm
Buchanan Tower, Room 1099
Please RSVP below in advance
A light lunch will be served at 1:00pm
Unfortunately, this event has reached capacity! We will open up a wait list soon to register interest should a space become available. The waitlist does not guarantee a space to this event.
Abstract:
Two and a half years into the accelerated genocide in Gaza, Israel continues its unbridled death campaign to destroy all life forms in the strip with international impunity. Palestine has, yet again, exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of so-called universal human rights and liberal humanism. If Israel’s impunity is secured through its status as the constitutive exception of Human Rights Discourse (Meister 2011) then the Palestinian becomes the constitutive outside of the “Human” in Human Rights.
Thinking with Palestinian revolutionary thought, this lecture explores the paradoxes of seeking freedom through rights and juridical recognition. The talk argues that the everyday labour of life in Palestine gives rise to a praxis of the human—one that gestures towards an impending freedom from within the ruins of empire and beyond the bounds of human rights. The talk turns to articulations of impending freedom that are not tied to struggle for rights, but to an exit from the law
About Dr. Layal Ftouni
Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is currently working on a book project on the ‘reproduction of life’, both human and environmental, in conditions of proximity to death and debilitation in the settler colonial context of Palestine. She received the Dutch Research Council VENI grant to support this project. Her publications and areas of research interests are, broadly construed, at the intersection of critical theory, gender studies, Palestine studies, political theory and critiques of the human/ human rights. In addition to her educational and research work, Layal is also a founding member of Dutch Scholars for Palestine, a network of educational workers across Dutch Universities committed to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.