Ohio University’s Constitution Day 2016 lecture features Dr. Renee Heberle discussing “Dignity vs Rights: Exploring the Practical Effects of Constitutional Principles in U.S. and German Prisons” on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 5 p.m. in Scripps 111.
Heberle is Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Program in Law and Social Thought at the University of Toledo.
A Constitution Day campus concert, Freedom Sings!, follows the talk at 7 p.m. in Baker Theater. All Constitution Day events are free and open to the public.
- Read more about Ohio University’s Constitution Day 2015 with Professor Carol Greenhouse
Professor Heberle’s Constitution Day lecture examines the limits of appealing to “rights” in addressing conditions and practices in US prisons. It compares US prison conditions and practices to those in Germany, where “dignity” provides the constitutional grounds on which conditions and practices are assessed. The commitment to the inviolability of human dignity, which is written into Article I of the German Basic Law (1949) and made concrete in the German prison law (1977), is associated with a very different sensibility about the role of prisons as institutional sites of the direct exercise of sovereign power.
The Constitution Day lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Law, Justice & Culture, the Department of Political Science, the Making & Breaking the Law theme, and the Office of the Vice President and Provost.
Professor Heberle coordinates the Inside/Out Prison Exchange Program and activities related to prison education at the Toledo Correctional Institution in Toledo.
On Friday, Sept. 30, Professor Heberle and Dr. Amanda Bryant, Associate Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University – Newark, will speak with students and faculty about the Inside/Out Exchange Program from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Bentley Annex 102.
Renee Heberle is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Toledo. She is Co-Director of the Program in Law and Social Thought and Interim Director of the School for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her research and teaching interests turned to prisons and the politics of incarceration in 2010. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch New Zealand and was been invited as a plenary panelist at as conference titled “‘Against our Will’: Forty Years After: Exploring the Field of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict” in July 2015 in Hamburg, Germany. Her fields of teaching and research within political science are political philosophy and contemporary critical and feminist theory. Courses include Principles of Political Theory, Contemporary Political Ideas; Sexual Politics; The Politics of Violence; the Inside/Out Prison Exchange: Law, Justice and Mass Incarceration; Race, Gender and Law; the Gateway to Law and Social Thought; the Capstone in LST: Prisons. Heberle has published in a numbers of venues. Her first and most reprinted and cited essay appeared in 1996 in Hypatia: A Journal of Women and Philosophy. She has since published articles and review essays in Law, Politics and Society and Signs: a Journal of Women and Culture, The Law and Society Review, and Political Theory. Her edited volumes include Feminist Interpretations of Adorno, Imagining Law: Essays on Drucilla Cornell, and Theorizing Sexual Violence. She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and B.A. in Theater from Brandeis University.
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