Susan Marks’ Foreword asks ‘If the World is a Household, What Form of Household Is It?’. It’s a provocative query for worldwide attorneys, because the trope of the household runs via the self-discipline in all types of advanced, even contradictory, methods. On this episode, Janne Nijman (Graduate Institute & College of Amsterdam) interviews Susan Marks (LSE) about her Foreword and the bigger challenge it inaugurates. Their dialog ranges throughout the three ‘instances’ featured within the Foreword—the human household in human rights legislation, the ‘household of countries’, and the kid as future in local weather change debates—and past. What are the stakes of using these familial tropes? What do they provide and what may they masks? What different discourses or imaginaries may be accessible?
The alternate strikes via visible in addition to textual languages of household, within the type of images exhibitions (for a glimpse: New York Museum of Trendy Artwork’s ‘The Household of Man’ (1955); the deliberate counterpoint and tribute, Fenix’s ‘The Household of Migrants’ (2025); in addition to World Press Picture’s ‘Ties that Bind: Images and Household’ (2025)).
Different scholarship talked about consists of Ariella Azoulay’s evaluation of the Household of Man exhibition as ‘A Visible Common Declaration of Human Rights’; Stephen Humphreys’ ‘Towards Future Generations’ (from EJIL 33(4), Nov 2022); Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004); Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019); and Janne Nijman’s ‘Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium’ in Koskenniemi et al (eds), Worldwide Legislation and Faith: Historic and Up to date Views (2017).
