ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

part I|2 pages

Human rights discourse: context and history

chapter 1|15 pages

Imaginary and real strangers

19Constructing and reconstructing the human in human rights discourse and instruments

chapter 2|16 pages

Rise of the global human rights regime

Challenging power with humanity

chapter 3|15 pages

Between nothingness and infinity

Settlement and anti-blackness as the overdetermination of human rights

chapter 5|19 pages

Women, gender, and human rights

chapter 7|18 pages

Unintended consequences in the postcolonies

When struggling South Africans experience rights discourse as disempowering

part II|2 pages

Critical areas in human rights

part III|2 pages

Praxis and human rights

chapter 14|15 pages

Migrant workers in the Gulf

Theoretical and human rights dilemmas

chapter 15|18 pages

Ethical reckoning

Theorizing gender, vulnerability, and agency in Bangladeshi Muktijuddho film

chapter 16|24 pages

Right now in no place with strangers

Eudora Welty’s queer love

chapter 18|15 pages

Beyond dignity

A case study of the mis/use of human rights discourse in development campaigns

chapter 19|19 pages

Teaching health and human rights in a psychology capstone

Cultivating connections between rights, personal wellness, and social justice

chapter |4 pages

Appendix

Human rights at a public urban university: the case of the University of Massachusetts Boston