Conference | Workshop

Human Development and Its Outliers

Date

Thursday 26 March 2026 - Friday 27 March 2026

Explanation

Keynote address in Lipsius 1.47

Address

Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden

Room

0.14

Register

Registration (via email)

This workshop focuses on the ways in which histories of designations such as “outlier,” “exclusionary,” and “marginal” reveal shifting boundaries that have traditionally divided communities into those that belong and those that do not. These outlier categories—such as disability, old age, (im)migrant, and other Others—also gesture towards histories of inclusion, that is, underlying models and trajectories of humandevelopment that shape (and are shaped by) such categories. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these models and the ideas of inclusion and exclusion that sustained them have fermented in the practices and discourses surrounding the nation-state project, particularly visible in the ways that welfare states have categorized, assessed, and provided (or not) for “vulnerable” groups. Trajectories of human development and its outliers have also been worked out in cultural productions, institutional settings, and in the ways that various international bodies, such as the UN and the WHO, have centered outlier categories in human rights discourse and practice. As such, models of human development and outlier categories have significantly contributed to how resources are allocated, how citizenship and concepts of belonging have been defined and displayed, and how national and international meaning-making has been carried out.

This workshop brings together scholars working on outlier categories with those scholars interested in histories of inclusion and normativity to query how normative models of human development emerge and how these models acquire authority; the roles that these models play in shaping ideas about which kinds of people come to be considered (and seen) as “outliers”; and the kinds of scientific, aesthetic, material, political, or economic scaffoldings on which these models and categories rest. In bringing together histories of exclusion with those of inclusion, we hope to not only expose the complexities revealed through various case studies but also to consider what, if anything, relates outlier categories to each other and to broader normative understandings of human development.

Programme and registration

Please send an email to [e-mail] if you would like to attend.

Read the full workshop programme.

Research project

This workshop is part of the Dutch Government Startersbeurs-funded ‘Human Development and Its Outliers’ project at Leiden University.

We are planning to create a special issue about this topic and will organize further (online) meetings to work on full papers after the conference.