ABSTRACT
The Human Rights Act (HRA) would introduce fundamental changes in the relations between individuals and public authorities, and it was expected that the relationships between these actors would be construed through the framework of an institutional and ethical meaning of human rights associated with the HRA. This chapter assesses the cultural aim of the HRA through an analysis of the cultural politics of human rights, focusing on the sectors of public life intended to be transformed by the Act. It sets out an approach to understanding and assessing a 'human rights culture', drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Kate Nash to describe how the concept of the human rights field can be used to analyse the cultural politics of human rights. After discussing the 'institutional' and 'ethical' meanings of human rights the HRA was intended to promote, the chapter discusses how the success of that aim can be assessed using the concept of the human rights field.
