Dr Ilia Xypolia presented her paper at the Governance by Numbers and its Discontents workshop. The workshop featured more than 20 academics through interdisciplinary collaborations and thought-provoking discussion, aimed to contribute to the research on the governance by numbers and its discontents.
Dr Xypolia discussed her paper entitled, ‘“Depoliticizing through numbers: quantifying human rights in EU discourse’. In this study, the use of measurements of some human rights in EU discourse was examined. This paper analyses data from the EU’s two decentralized agencies Eurofound and FRA that are remitted to research and produce knowledge on their respective areas of rights. The argument is that through separating measurements and discourse, the predominance of a narrow understanding of human rights is advanced in the EU rights discourse. Human rights are equated only with certain civil and political rights while the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights are ignored, and ultimately the equal status of workers' rights is undermined.
The two-day workshop, Governance by Numbers and its Discontents, 29 and 30 June, was organised by Dr Lorenzo Cini, Professor Roland Erne, and Dr Bianca Föhrer. The workshop was sponsored by the MSCF project COGONU and the ERC project European Unions and was held at the UCD, Quinn School of Business, Dublin.