Since the early 1980’s,
and over the last ten years in particular, the language of human rights
has penetrated virtually every corner of global and domestic politics,
and public discourse. Thanks to the contemporary human rights revolution,
international human rights norms have become standard barometers for
assessing the quality of human dignity and freedom. Despite this efflorescence
of human rights, abusive regimes and practices continue in the post-Cold-War
world; sharply divided lines between East and West, North and South
no longer map the central divisions in human rights principles and practices.
The seeming paradox of simultaneously expanding human rights protections
and violations poses a daunting challenge to students and practitioners
of human rights, a challenge only deepened by the fractured state of
the global community. At the same time that the world situation demands
greater vigilance, the myriad contradictions between global human rights
principles and abusive practices call for greater clarity in the definition
of what human rights are, where they come from, and what they mean.
The importance of human rights in contemporary public discussion, the
magnitude of current global humanitarian crises, and the exploration
of the legal, philosophical, cultural, and social dimensions of human
rights are widely recognized in the academy. This situation demands
new and creative approaches to the incorporation of human rights within
a liberal arts curriculum.
More and more undergraduate programs have begun to add human rights
courses and subfields to their curriculum. However, it remains the general
rule that most American universities offer human rights courses primarily
through law schools, while most of the available human rights textbooks
are intended for law students. Legal education in human rights, however,
is designed to train human rights lawyers and to inform other future
attorneys about the existence and application of basic international
human rights law. The deeper ontological, hermeneutical, and humanistic
questions at the core of a liberal arts education receive secondary
attention, at best, in this environment. The many innovative human rights
courses sprouting up across the humanities and social sciences that
delve specifically into the defining questions and pedagogical aspirations
of a liberal arts education, furthermore, tend to lack a unifying disciplinary
thread, or a rudimentary plan for how disparate courses should build
upon one another or, towards what ends they should be building. Even
in colleges and programs with well-developed human rights curricula,
the disciplinary outlines of the field remain murky and erratic.
This seminar aims to provide a forum to bring together faculty members
from Midwestern colleges and universities to discuss the integration
human rights education into a liberal arts program. We hope to draw
upon the different disciplinary, regional, and thematic foci of the
various participants to address a series of critical questions facing
all of us as human rights educators: How do we negotiate the tensions
between different disciplinary practices, in order to integrate diverse
courses and research into a specific area of inquiry? How do we explore
legal norms and instruments from broader humanistic and social scientific
perspectives without either distorting their legal realities or limiting
discussion to questions of justiciability or legal outcomes? How do
we teach the role of the U.S. in global human rights, and how do we
explain the difference between the predominant perspective of civil
rights in the U.S. and that of international human rights? How do we
cultivate student writing and research in human rights sustained on
quality social scientific and humanistic analysis, rather than mere
moral indignation? What are the disciplinary consequences of using human
rights as a rubric to teach students about civic engagement?
Drawing on the resources of the University of Chicago Human Rights Program,
we will investigate the multi-faceted possibilities for human rights
education within a liberal arts curriculum. Our speakers and participants
will bring a wide variety of disciplinary, methodological, and practical
commitments to the conversation. They will include: Rev. Alison Boden
(Divinity School and Dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel), Andreas Glaeser
(Sociology), Michael Green (Philosophy), Susan Gzesh (Director of Human
Rights Program, International Studies Center), Hans Joas (Sociology,
Committee on Social Thought), and Bill Novak (English). Individual discussions
will address: the role of religious studies in human rights, human rights
and international law, the human rights implications of gender studies,
and the place of human rights in an undergraduate curriculum.
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