Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights. Each of the novels Anker examines approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie's Midnight's Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women’s freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.

This book argues that the significance of Coetzee's complex and finely-nuanced fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel - ranging from Cervantes, Defoe, and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Beckett - as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics.

Dignity is fundamental to every single person’s life and history; and every interaction with another human being can potentially influence a person’s sense of identity and self-esteem. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of ‘dignity in care’. When healthcare organisations and individuals prioritise dignity, service users, carers and staff are treated with respect, compassion and understanding, and safe, good-quality healthcare services are delivered. In contrast, when dignity and respect are neglected or violated, people experience poor-quality care and may even suffer neglect and abuse. For all these reasons, it is clearly vital that all healthcare workers have a thorough understanding of dignity and how to place it at the centre of all their activities. In this helpful and thought-provoking book, the contributors offer an overview of current research on dignity-preserving care, highlighting practical and ethical considerations in various healthcare settings. Section I introduces some key dignity theories, demonstrating how the use of narrative can offer insight and practical solutions for the delivery of high-quality care. Section II introduces actual stories from diverse settings and perspectives, enabling the reader to engage with core elements of dignity while highlighting how dignity can be preserved – even in very challenging practice situations. Critical thinking activities are also provided to encourage deep reflection and learning. This book will support students of nursing and allied healthcare professions, as well as healthcare professionals working in diverse practice settings, to reflect upon and enhance the quality of their care. Contents include: • Foreword: old and new philosophical angles on dignity in care • Preface: the necessity of dignity in healthcare • Understanding dignity: a complex concept at the heart of healthcare • Dignity and narrative: moral intuitions and contested claims • Dignity in dementia care • Dignity, protected by caring in care • Storytelling as a dignity-preserving practice in palliative care • Reintegrating spirituality and dignity in nursing and healthcare: a relational model of practice • The service provider and care perspective • Let us not forget the dignity of the professional caregiver: the necessity of dignity preservation within the therapeutic context • Dignity in suffering: a theological perspective • Learning dignity by involvement • Dignity in cancer care: a discussion based on three narratives written by nurses • A story of facilitators’ experiences of the Excellence in Practice Accreditation Scheme and its influence on quality, dignity and respect • Afterword: what gets in the way of dignity, and why you must not let it

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking rights seriously has never been more urgent. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written as a contribution to this vital debate. Each moreover is written in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, reaching across the myriad constitutive disciplines of law, literature and the humanities in order to present an array of alternative perspectives on the nature and meaning of human rights in the modern world. The taking of human rights seriously, it will be suggested, depends just as much on taking seriously the idea of the human as it does the idea of rights.

This is the first anthology to bring together a selection of the most important contemporary philosophical essays on the nature and moral significance of self-respect. Representing a diversity of views, the essays illustrate the complexity of self-respect and explore its connections to such topics as personhood, dignity, rights, character, autonomy, integrity, identity, shame, justice, oppression and empowerment. The book demonstrates that self-respect is a formidable concern which goes to the very heart of both moral theory and moral life. Contributors: Bernard Boxill, Stephen L. Darwall, John Deigh, Robin S. Dillon, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Aurel Kolnai, Stephen J. Massey, Diana T. Meyers, Michelle M. Moody-Adams, John Rawls, Gabriele Taylor, Elizabeth Telfer, Laurence L. Thomas.

Increasingly, international legal arrangements imagine future worlds or create space for experts to articulate how the future can be conceptualized and managed. With the increased specialization of international law, a series of functional regimes and sub-regimes has emerged, each with their own imageries, vocabularies, expert-knowledge, and rules to translate our hopes and fears for the future into action in the present. At issue in the development of these regimes are not just competing predictions of the future based on what we know about what has happened in the past and what we know is happening in the present. Rather, these regimes seek to deal with futures about which we know very little or nothing at all; futures that are inherently uncertain and even potentially catastrophic; futures for which we need to find ways to identify, conceptualise, manage, and regulate risks the existence of which we can possibly only speculate about. This book explores how the future is imagined, articulated, and managed across the various fields of international law, including the use of force, maritime security, international economic and environmental law, and human rights. It investigates how the future is construed in these various areas; how the costs of risk, risk regulation, risk assessment, and risk management are distributed in international law; the effect of uncertain futures on the subjects of international law; and the way in which international law operates when faced with catastrophic or existential risk.

The focus of teaching is not on what we teach or how we test but, more fundamentally, on the quality of relationships, according to Jaylynne Hutchinson in Students on the Margins. Amid much talk of educational reform that focuses on pedagogy, curriculum, and policy, Hutchinson attests that when we don't pay attention to students' personal stories, students can become marginalized from the process of learning, not only via race, class, and gender, but also psycho-socially. Using story as a metaphor for paying attention to the meaning children create in their lives, she suggests how story can become an active part of the classroom and curriculum, asking teachers to pay attention to relationships and to create the space to accommodate stories in the classroom.