Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

This course introduces students to the problems involved in the assertion of universal moral standards across political and cultural divides. These issues will be explored at a theoretical level, and in the context of specific human rights controversies.

COURSE DETAILS:

We live in an age of human rights. The global triumph of human rights has signalled, for some, the advancement or even completion of the Enlightenment promise of human emancipation through reason. Yet, amidst poetic declarations and the formation of a vast global legal and institutional apparatus, human life nonetheless finds itself brutally subjected to power, inequality, and expulsion on a mass scale. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, never before have so many human beings been subjugated, dominated, or starved on earth. The rapid growth of urban slums throughout the world and the intensification of processes of economic inequality under neoliberal capitalism, as well as the emergence of new conflicts and growing populations of stateless and displaced persons, seem to indicate that our age is one of human crisis rather than triumph. In this way, the historical ascendancy of human rights has proved to be a paradoxical process. This course interrogates the paradox of what human rights mean and can mean in a world plagued by violence, inequality, and domination.  It does this by facilitating a critical engagement with historical and contemporary human rights theories. Particular emphasis is placed on feminist theories and practices of human rights, from Olympe de Gouge and Mary Wollstonecraft to contemporary transnational feminist networks and movements. Some of the major questions we will confront are: What are human rights and what explains their historical emergence as a specific form of legal-political discourse and practice? What are the grounds for human rights? How do human rights function in the real world? Who counts as human? How do human rights relate to gender? Who or what stands opposed to human rights? What is the relationship between social movements and human rights? Can human rights be established and secured through legislation and institutions or do they exist only insofar as they are enacted by means of collective struggle?

There will be a 4-hour seminar each week.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: