We invite you to join us to engage with leading business and human rights (BHR) scholars to discuss significant and landmark publications in the field.
We will identify pressing topics and themes for future BHR scholarship, as well as what they mean for learning about BHR in universities.
This series of online sessions will provide an interactive platform for conversations about BHR scholarship, teaching and beyond.
Upcoming events
28 October 2026, 4pm (UK time)
Alysha Shivji, EGADE Business School
Title: "Taking a Break from the UNGPs & Reimagining Remedy"
The UNGPs have played a foundational role in establishing business and human rights as a global field of policy and practice. Yet their dominance also raises important questions about the possibilities they may have constrained. This conversation is a place where we explore what we learn by temporarily stepping outside the UNGP framework and reconsidering how we understand accountability and remedy?
Drawing on her recent Business and Human Rights Journal article, Time for a Break from the UNGPs?, this conversation explores how the field’s emphasis on consensus, pragmatism, and procedural compliance may limit more transformative approaches to business accountability. Alysha connects these arguments to her research on worker-driven social responsibility and the Fair Food Program, examining what becomes possible when affected rightsholders play a more substantial role in shaping accountability and remedy. The session will engage with recent research by Grama and Githu on an OGM in Kenya, to also consider how mechanisms intended to provide remedy can constrain which harms are recognized and how community dissent challenges the boundaries of corporate-defined grievance processes.
Rather than proposing a single alternative model, the conversation invites participants to reconsider whose knowledge, priorities, and experiences define harm and effective remedy, and how we might create space for more participatory and transformative approaches.
Reading list
Archive of previous events
16 September 2026, 4pm (UK time)
Rim Bitar, University of Geneva
Title: "The Roads Back to One Another: Women’s Continuity Work in the Reconstruction of Social Life in Syria"
The paper examines how Syrian women are marginalized from the institutions and initiatives authorized to define reconstruction while already rebuilding social life by documenting disappearances, preserving memory, organizing victims, accompanying survivors and creating recognition across communities divided by violence.
Drawing on 30 qualitative interviews, we conceptualize these practices as continuity work: the contested and gendered organizing through which actors carry, repair, transform or refuse relationships, memories, places and forms of belonging across social rupture. We argue that women’s work is not merely informal care surrounding reconstruction but politically consequential organizing that produces collective capacity, even as institutions deny its producers equivalent recognition, resources and reconstructive authority.
2026
13 May 2026, 4pm (UK time)
Teaching BHR network
We ended the series for the summer by hosting our second panel on teaching BHR. Our panellists discussed their pedagogical approach to BHR, given its varied audiences, engaged learning activities, and how to teach BHR in a politically charged environment. This panel was co-organized with the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum, a body comprising 350 teachers of business and human rights from 140 different countries.
The panel was Chaired by Professor Tricia Olsen with the following panellists: Professor Elisa Giuliani, Dr Rachel Chambers and Dr Samentha Goethals
22 April 2026, 4pm (UK time)
Catherine McDonald University of St. Gallen
Title: Bridging business and human rights and business for peace: A case study of Microsoft’s multitrack diplomacy
Catherine presented her work on responsible business conduct in complex environments, specifically at the intersection of business and human rights (BHR), and business for peace (B4P). During the presentation, she discussed how multinational enterprises can address issues of polycentric governance, drawing from an empirical case study of Microsoft’s corporate diplomacy activities on digital peace in cyberspace. She argued for the importance of addressing B4P activities in tandem with BHR in a complementary manner within practitioner initiatives.
21 January 2026, 4pm (UK time)
Janine Allenbacher, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Title: “Insights from Four Years of BHR Research”
Janine presented key findings from her PhD dissertation on corporate human rights practices in global supply chains. In particular, her findings address the effectiveness of HRDD-related practices in changing suppliers’ behaviour and cascading human rights standards further upstream. She also discussed which practices are most suitable for generating positive impacts for rightsholders in conflict-affected areas and how businesses can move beyond symbolic compliance with HRDD laws.
2025
17 December 2025, 4pm (UK time)
Dr Rajiv Maher of Egade Business School, Tecnologico de Monterrey together with Alix Blanchard of La Rochelle University/Panthéon-Assas University.
Title: "Becoming Uncomfortably Numb: A Collaborative Auto-ethnography of Managerialism in Business and Human Rights"
In this collaborative auto-ethnography we examine how managerialism in Business and Human Rights shapes both organizational dynamics and personal subjectivities. We retrace our own experiences of enthusiasm, disillusion, disengagement and resistance, as compliance logics technicalise and depoliticize harm while drowning out rightsholders’ voices.
This process fosters a deep and troubling tension between subjection to professional norms and ethical self-conduct, producing ‘uncomfortably numb’ BHR practitioners. Building on Foucault’s parrhesia, we invite a critical reflection on how to reclaim space for transformative practice within the BHR field.
Reading list
19 November 2025, 4pm (UK time)
Dr Elif Nur Duman-Cogen of University of Bath School of Management.
Title: "Refugee Women in the Global South: Understanding Stigmatised Work and Agency Within Their Cultural Context"
Based on her ethnography of Syrian refugee women in Istanbul, Elif will discuss how to understand work and agency within their own ethical tradition. She will share insights into what domestic work and cleaning mean in the Syrian ethical tradition, and how various forms of agency, such as the agency of silence, are exercised by women to rebuild their honourable sense of self while performing doubly stigmatised work.
Reading list
22 October 2025, 4pm (UK time)
Joining forces with Dr Onna Malou van den Broek’s Corporate Political Actors (CPA) reading group, we hear from the lead author Dr Visa Penttilä, title “Decontesting Corporate Responsibility for Collaboration”.