When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948, photography was considered a 'universal language' that would communicate across barriers of race and culture. 70 years later it is timely to examine the cultural impact of the framework of human rights through visual culture. Images are a crucial way of disseminating ideas, creating a sense of proximity between peoples across the globe, and reinforcing notions of a shared humanity. Yet visual culture can also define boundaries between people, supporting perceived hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, and justifying arguments for conquest and oppression. Only in recent years have scholars begun to argue for new notions of photography and culture that turn our attention to our responsibilities as viewers, or an ethics of spectatorship. This book explores questions surrounding the historical reception of human rights via imagery and its legacies in the present. Visualising Human Rights is about the diverse ways that visual images have been used to define, contest, or argue on behalf of human rights. It brings together leading scholars to examine visual practices surrounding human rights around the globe.

This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few. The book demonstrates the emergence of the ‘universal’ subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the ‘culture’ and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form. The book will appeal to scholars in comics studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies and to the general reader with an interest in these fields.

Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights. Using an innovative visual methodology, Redhead shines a new critical light on human rights campaigns in practice. She examines two cases in-depth. First, she shows how Amnesty International depicts women negatively in their 2004 ‘Stop Violence against Women Campaign’, revealing the political implications of how images deny women their agency because violence is gendered. She also analyses the Oka conflict between indigenous people and the Canadian state. She explains how the Canadian state defined the Mohawk people in such a way as to deny their human subjectivity. By looking at how the Mohawk used visual media to communicate their plight beyond state boundaries, she delves into the disjuncture between state sovereignty and human rights. This book is useful for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.

On the occasion of the 60 anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this special issue of the OECD Journal on Development focuses on robust methods and tools for assessing human rights, democracy and governance.

The objective of this book is to highlight the need and value of imbuing the dynamic intersections between education, human rights and diversity with perspectives from the Global South. The chapters approach key intellectual conundrums of the day from a Global South perspective to reflect a credible scholarly footprint in Africa and in the SADC region. This is deemed timely considering that the field is deeply embedded in western, Eurocentric and overall Global North dominance. This book will provide a Southern perspective on education and human rights in diversity by unpacking each of the following key areas in the intersection between education, human rights and diversity from a Southern perspective: comparative international perspectives, citizenship education, human rights literacies, human rights education pedagogy, learner discipline in schools, aggression and bullying in schools, addressing human trafficking by means of human rights education, social justice, and the decolonisation of human rights and human rights education.

Über das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Menschenrechten und modernen Technologien für die Zeit seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Werkzeug der Unterdrückung oder Vehikel der Emanzipation? Moderne Technologien sind zu einem wichtigen Thema der Menschenrechtspolitik geworden. Überwachungstechnik, militärische Drohnen und digitale Datenanalysen stellen die internationale Menschenrechtsbewegung vor neue Herausforderungen. Gleichzeitig eröffnen diese Techniken auch neue Chancen, Menschenrechtsverletzungen zu dokumentieren, anzuprangern und ein zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement zu fördern. In diesem Band wird diese ambivalente Beziehung in historischer Perspektive analysiert. Gezeigt wird, wie die Verbreitung moderner Technologien die Menschenrechtspolitik herausforderte und unterstützte. Hervorgehoben werden dabei vier Schlüsselbereiche: 1. Entwicklungspolitik, allen voran bei Infrastrukturen und technischen Großprojekten, 2. Bevölkerungspolitik und demographisches Wissen, 3. Medien- und Kommunikationstechnologien und 4. die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Computerisierung. Indem diese Debatten für die Zeit nach 1945 nachgezeichnet werden, erhalten aktuelle Diskussionen über die Herausforderungen neuer technologischer Entwicklungen eine historische Dimension. Der Band erscheint vollständig in englischer Sprache. _____ The volume analyses the ambivalent relationship between human rights and modern technologies since 1945. Tools of suppression or agents of emancipation? Modern technologies have become a major subject of human rights policy. Surveillance technology, the military use of drones, and the possibilities of Big Data analysis pose new challenges for the international human rights movement. At the same time, these techniques offer new ways to document and denounce violations of human rights and to promote mass mobilization. The volume analyses this ambivalent relationship between human rights and technological change in a historical perspective. Showing how the spread of modern technologies both challenged and served human rights policies, the volume focuses on four key areas of technological change: 1) development politics, infrastructures and large technical systems, 2) population politics and demographical knowledge, 3) media cultures and communication technologies, and 4) the societal impact of computerization. By sketching these debates since 1945, the volume adds a historical perspective to current debates about the political and ethical challenges of new technological developments. The volume is published entirely in English.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights offers a comprehensive and contemporary survey of the key themes, approaches and debates in the field of media and human rights. The Companion is the first collection to bring together two distinct ways of thinking about human rights and media, including scholarship that examines media as a human right alongside that which looks at media coverage of human rights issues. This international collection of 49 newly written pieces thus provides a unique overview of current research in the field, while also providing historical context to help students and scholars appreciate how such developments depart from past practices. The volume examines the universal principals of freedom of expression, legal instruments, the right to know, media as a human right, and the role of media organisations and journalistic work. It is organised thematically in five parts: Communication, Expression and Human Rights Media Performance and Human Rights: Political Processes Media Performance and Human Rights: News and Journalism Digital Activism, Witnessing and Human Rights Media Representation of Human Rights: Cultural, Social and Political. Individual essays cover an array of topics, including mass-surveillance, LGBT advocacy, press law, freedom of information and children’s rights in the digital age. With contributions from both leading scholars and emerging scholars, the Companion offers an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to media and human rights allowing for international comparisons and varying perspectives. The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights provides a comprehensive introduction to the current field useful for both students and researchers, and defines the agenda for future research.