1st Edition
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights History, Politics, Practice
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice is an edited collection that brings together analyses of human rights work from multiple disciplines. Within the academic sphere, this book will garner interest from scholars who are invested in human rights as a field of study, as well as those who research, and are engaged in, the praxis of human rights.
Referring to the historical and cross-cultural study of human rights, the volume engages with disciplinary debates in political philosophy, gender and women’s studies, Global South/Third World studies, international relations, psychology, and anthropology. At the same time, the authors employ diverse methodologies including oral history, theoretical and discourse analysis, ethnography, and literary and cinema studies. Within the field of human rights studies, this book attends to the critical academic gap on interdisciplinary and praxis-based approaches to the field, as opposed to a predominantly legalistic focus, drawing from case studies from a wide range of contexts in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Colombia, Haiti, India, Mexico, Palestine, and Sudan, as well as from Australia and the United States in the Global North.
For students who will go on to become researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists, this collection of essays will demonstrate the multifaceted landscape of human rights and the multiple forces (philosophical, political, cultural, economic, historical) that affect it.
Introduction Rajini Srikanth and Elora Halim Chowdhury
Part I. Human Rights Discourse: Context and History
Chapter 1: Imaginary and Real Strangers: Constructing and Reconstructing the Human in Human Rights Discourse and Instruments
Mickaella Perina
Chapter 2: Rise of the Global Human Rights Regime: Challenging Power with Humanity
Darren Kew, Malcolm Russell-Einhorn, and Adriana Rincón Villegas
Chapter 3: Between Nothingness and Infinity: Settlement and Anti-Blackness as the Overdetermination of Human Rights Andrés Fabián Henao-Castro
Chapter 4: Human Rights, Latin America, and Left Internationalism during the Cold War
Steve Striffler
Chapter 5: Women, Gender, and Human Rights
Nada Mustafa Ali
Chapter 6: The United States-Mexico Border and Human Rights
Luis F. Jiménez
Chapter 7: Unintended Consequences in the Postcolonies: Struggling South Africans Experience Rights Discourse As Disempowering
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
Part II. Critical Areas in Human Rights
Chapter 8: The Mysterious Disappearance of Human Rights in the 2030 Development Agenda
Gillian MacNaughton
Chapter 9: Addressing General Recommendation No. 35 from an Intersectional Perspective on Violence, Gender and Disability in Mexico
Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez
Chapter 10: Global LGBTQ politics and Human Rights
Jamie J. Hagen
Chapter 11: Refugee Camps and the (Educational) Rights of the Child
Rajini Srikanth
Chapter 12: Persistent Voices: A History of Indigenous People and Human Rights in Australia, 1950s-2000s
Maria John
Part III. Praxis and Human Rights
Chapter 13: So, You Want to Work in Human Rights?
Jean-Philippe Belleau
Chapter 14: Migrant Workers in the Gulf: Theoretical and Human Rights Dilemmas
Amani El Jack
Chapter 15: Ethical Reckoning: Theorizing Gender, Vulnerability, and Agency in Bangladesh Muktijuddho Film
Elora Halim Chowdhury
Chapter 16: Right Now in No Place with Strangers: Eudora Welty’s Queer Love
Avak Hasratian
Chapter 17: On The Human Right to Peace in Times of Contemporary Colonial Power
Adriana Rincón Villegas
Chapter 18: Beyond Dignity: A Case Study of the Mis/Use of Human Rights Discourse in Development Campaigns
Chris Bobel
Chapter 19: Teaching Health and Human Rights in a Psychology Capstone: Cultivating Connections between Rights, Personal Wellness and Social Justice
Ester Shapiro, Fernando Andino Valdez, Yasmin Bailey, Grace Furtado, Diana Lamothe, Kosar Mohammad, Mardia Pierre and Nick Wood
Appendix
Bryan Gangemi And Rita Arditti
Index
Biography
Rajini Srikanth is Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Her research interests include the intersection between literature and human rights, post-apartheid South Africa, comparative race and ethnic studies, and Asian American literature. Her recent publications include Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in US Literature and Law (2012) and The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (2016).
Elora Halim Chowdhury is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Her research interests include transnational feminisms, film and culture, and human rights narrative with an emphasis on South Asia. Her recent publications include Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (2011) and Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism and Transnational Solidarity (2016).
"Scholars, activists, and policy makers will find Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights invaluable to understanding the evolution of human rights doctrine and the tensions between its aspirations and outcomes. The authors provide nuanced, balanced, illuminating accounts of both the productive and problematic consequences of enforcing universalistic conceptions of human rights within diverse cultural settings."
Amrita Basu, Paino Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, Amherst College, USA