Corporatism and Human Rights

This course will think through the relationship between corporatism and human rights. This considers, most immediately, the field of business and human rights, which includes attempts at strategic litigation and advocacy to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations. More substantively, however, it interrogates the meanings and histories of "Corporatism" itself, as a relation of production and a mode of governance. What is the relationship between corporatism and capitalism? How is it implicated in histories of colonization and empire? How might we think about the relations between corporatism and constitutionality, in the US and elsewhere? And, what are the future horizons of corporatism and its implications for rights, especially in the context of the consolidating hegemonies of Big Tech?