WGSS 314
Paradoxes of Human Rights and Humanitarianism Fall 2015
Division II
Cross-listed GBST 313 / ANTH 312
This is not the current course catalog

In recent decades, human rights activism has become the central idiom through which people world-wide make claims about social justice. Yet issues like gendered and sexual violence, access to health-care, and socio-economic inequality have only recently been framed as human rights issues. In this course, we examine this recent transformation, focusing on the paradoxes and possibilities of a human rights framework for addressing these problems. We will do so by comparing different humanitarian and human rights-based interventions as they play out in places from rural Kenyan courts to United Nations conferences to the American college campus. Along the way, we will examine the history of human rights as a means to imagine social justice, and how a focus on human rights reveals and complicates new configurations of global power. We will read historical and ethnographic studies of human rights, and finishwith several case studies of human rights work on gender, violence, and health.