Human Rights Fall Seminar Info Page

Colleagues this a running blog for our seminar. I’ll include the schedule with readings, please use the comment page to enter new bibliographic information. If you send me materials, I can also load it on the site. This will be a pretty simple interface.  This is the link to Human Rights Minor and the UC-wide Human Rights Collaboration.

Revised Fall Human Rights Seminar Outline

Colleagues: I’ve made some small adjustments based on scheduling needs to the schedule of the seminar meetings. There are still about 20 days between meetings.

Meeting Two:

Monday November 5, 2012

12:30-2:30 pm 9th Floor Sproul Hall Meeting Room

Meeting Three:

Monday November 26, 2012

12:30-2:30 pm 9th Floor Sproul Hall Meeting Room

And again: Lunch will be served….

Unfortunately, this leaves us fewer opportunities for a fourth meeting in the quarter, but we can certainly attempt to identify a possible date.

Readings and Seminar Content:

Participants

Faculty

Keith David Watenpaugh, Human Rights Initiative Director

Michael Lazzara, Spanish

Susan Miller, History

Heghnar Z. Watenpaugh, Art History

Bella Merlin, Drama

Diane Wolf, Sociology

Meaghan O’Keefe, Human Rights Minor

Graduate Students

Noel Joshi-Richard, Philosophy

Katherine Unger, International Relations

Andrea Dooley, Cultural Studies

Amy Riddle, Comparative Literature

Ryan Trip, History and Native American Studies

Tania Lizarazo, Spanish and Portugese

Seminar Goals

1)   Introduce ourselves to some of the current thinking and debates about the origins, definitions, key moments, movements and failures of human rights and what these can tell us about modern understandings of the concept of humanity and the project of humanitarianism.

2)   Survey the institutional structures, ideology and forms — treaties, bureaucracies, non-governmental organizations, forms of civil society — that define, protect and promote human rights.

3)   Explore how the study of human rights can be integrated into research projects and what kind of basic questions about human rights should form the basis of graduate-level seminars. At the same time, we can think about how to build capacity in this field for graduate studies and how this new capacity can contribute to the improvement and expansion of graduate student employment opportunities and career paths.

We only have three, maybe four meetings to address these issues, so we should anticipate a very modest and preliminary outcome.  While I will propose a rough outline below of what we can work on in our meetings, I’m hoping that the seminar will evolve organically and if new questions arise we can follow these, as well.

Seminar Outline and Readings

I’d like to invite you to form discussion leader teams for each week. The teams would be responsible for identifying/critiquing /helping us think about that week’s subject, and would ask that you share some of your preliminary observations to the seminar via email before hand. You may want to meet virtually or even un-virtually in advance.

Meeting One

The where, who, when and why of human rights?  The main reading for this meeting is Jean H. Quataert’s  Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (2010). Quataert’s work locates the origins of human rights beyond the rubric of international law and high politics in post-WW II grassroots movements.  What I think is important about the work is both its revisionary historical approach and its empirical and case study based narrative. And it doesn’t get bogged down in musty legal discussions.

What I would ask you to please do is read first the article, Jan Herman Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of the Human Rights Idea in the Twentieth Century,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1992).  burgerroadtosf

Leads:

Meaghan O’Keefe

Ryan Tripp

Diane Wolf

Meeting Two

We’ll think about human rights and transnational networks of activists, primarily in the sphere of international civil society, with the work of Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink.  Their book Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998) is quite good and has achieved a kind of key-work status in the field, this despite the fact that their historical discussion — i.e. suffrage and anti-slavery movements as exemplary of human rights activism — is being challenged. Their work on South America is particularly important.  Sikkink is a leading advocate of human rights education and holds a distinguished chair at the University of Minnesota, where she has been instrumental in having the school declared a human rights university (though to be honest, I’m still not so clear on what that means.)

Alongside this book, I would ask you to please read Meredith Terretta’s recent Human Rights Quarterly article, “‘We Had Been Fooled into Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World’: Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonization,” Human Rights Quarterly 34:2 (2012) 329-360.  34.2.terretta

Leads:

Michael Lazzara

Heghnar Watenpaugh

Bella Merlin

Amy Riddle

Katherine Unger

Meeting Three

In this meeting, we will tackle Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia (2010).  This is a broadly revisionist text, which has caused a real upheaval in human rights studies – and indeed, Moyn is not without his detractors.  The book is dense and theoretical, but is an important provocation and possible corrective.  It is important to understand Moyn’s argument and its reverse.  I’ve included a link to Gary Bass’ biting review:

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/78542/the-old-new-thing-human-rights

Leads:

Susan Miller

Andrea Dooley

Noel Joshi-Richard

Tania Lizarazo

Meeting Four (optional)

If people still have the energy and the inclination, I thought we could hold one last meeting to think about specific issues and questions about environmental and trans-generational human rights, the role of culture, cultural heritage and memory in human rights, and performing and enacting human rights through the Fine Arts. I want to leave this as an open possibility and build it from readings proposed by the seminar participants.

Here is my paper

“Between Communal Survival and National Aspiration: Armenian Genocide Refugees, The League of Nations and the Practices of Interwar Humanitarianism” Humanity (4:2 Summer, 2013) forthcoming.  Watenpaugh-Between-Communal-Survival-and-National-Aspiration