CRN

14160

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

CLAS / LIT 216

Title

Ancient Law and Human Rights

Professor

Alan Zeitlin

Schedule

Mon Wed       3:00 pm -  4:20 pm       OLIN 203

Cross-listed:  Classics

The course will focus on nascent concepts of human rights in several ancient cultures:  Greece, Rome, Israel, and China.  Though none of these cultures had a formal law or doctrine of human rights, it is nevertheless worthwhile asking to what extent fundamental modern notions (such as the right of the individual to speak freely and not to be subjected to torture, rape, or collective punishment) exist in the jurisprudence, customs, philosophy and literature (including historiography) of these cultures.  Such an inquiry will illuminate not only the roots of some of our modern ideas about human rights, but also the nature of many of the barriers that remain to implementing them.

 

CRN

14216

Distribution

C

Course No.

PS / HR 229

Title

Judgements, Rights, Dissent

Professor

Daniel Karpowitz

Schedule

Wed Fr          10:00 am - 11:20 am     OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Human Rights

This course introduces a novel approach to some basic questions about legal judgement, rights, and constitutionalism. Students will learn some key legal terms and doctrines, but the ultimate aim of the course is to enrich students’ ways of thinking about texts and to develop their interest in the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Three different moments in American legal history provide case-studies, each one explores a fundamental experience with the discourse of rights: the antebellum crisis surrounding abolition and the Fugitive Slave Laws; the conundrum of the ‘lawful’ state crimes first conceptualized as genocide in the 1950’s; and the recent U.S. Supreme Court controversy over the Victim Rights Movement. A final section of the course culminates in a study of the peculiar American practice of institutionalized dissent, and its significance for thinking about how we manage conflicts of rights, power, and interpretation. Those so inclined will be able to think about contemporary human rights issues in light of material found in American law and literature. Students must juxtapose radically different sorts of texts in order to explore the underlying political interests that unite them. Members of the class will practice intensive reading of Constitutional case law, legal philosophy, a political science monograph, actual trial transcripts, and some of the finest pieces of American legal fiction. Although the readings and discussions are intensive, the diversity of materials and subjects are intended to appeal to a wide range of students.

 

CRN

14456

Distribution

C

Course No.

HR 238

Title

Justice after Dictatorship

Professor

Ian Buruma

Schedule

Mon Wed       11:30 am - 12:50 pm     OLIN 101

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

This course will examine the various ways of cleaning up the mess after dictatorships have fallen. These include war crimes tribunals, truth commissions, and the political use of personal files. We will look at the effect tribunals have had on democratic transitions, especially in Germany and Japan after World War II. Other problems to be explored are the use of international laws in sovereign states; the questions of truth-telling and retribution, of individual and collective guilt, and the use of human rights and international justice as the latest assertion of a universalist faith.  Readings include: Lawrence Wechsler’s  A Miracle, a Universe; Richard Minear‘s Victor's Justice; Telford Taylor’s Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials;  Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt and John Dower’s Embracing Defeat.

 

CRN

14204

Distribution

A

Course No.

HR / ANTH 261

Title

Anthropology of Violence and Suffering

Professor

Laura Kunreuther

Schedule

Tu Th            11:30 am - 12:50 pm     OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Why do acts of violence continue to grow in the ‘modern’ world?  In what ways has violence become naturalized in the contemporary world?  In this course, we will consider how acts of violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity, raising important questions about what it means to be human today.  These questions lie at the heart of anthropological thinking and also structure contemporary discussions of human rights.  Anthropology’s commitment to “local culture”  and cultural diversity has meant that anthropologists often position themselves in critical opposition to “universal values,” which have been used to address various forms of violence in the contemporary world. The course will approach different forms of violence, including ethnic and communal conflicts, colonial education, torture and its individualizing effects, acts of terror and institutionalized fear, and rituals of bodily pain that mark individuals’ inclusion or exclusion from a social group.  The course is organized around three central concerns.  First, we will discuss violence as a means of producing and consolidating social and political power, and exerting political control.  Second, we will look at forms of violence that have generated questions about “universal rights” of humanity versus culturally specific practices, such as widow burning in India and female genital mutilation in postcolonial Africa. In these examples, we explore gendered dimensions in the experience of violence among perpetrators, victims, and survivors. Finally, we will look at the ways human rights institutions have sought to address the profundity of human suffering and pain, and ask in what ways have they succeeded and/or failed.  Readings will range from theoretical texts, anthropological ethnographies, as well as popular representations of violence in the media and film.  This course fulfills a core class requirement for the Human Rights program.

 

CRN

14105

Distribution

C

Course No.

HIST / HR 2702

Title

Liberty, National Rights, and Human Rights: The Origins and Implications of Human Rights Law, Institutions, and Policy in the Modern Period

Professor

Gregory Moynahan

Schedule

Tu Th            8:30 am -  9:50 am       OLIN 201

The history of ‘human rights’ can formally be said to come into existence only with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the successor conventions that ultimately formed the International Bill of Human Rights.  Both the declaration and its later instantiations were created in reaction to the problems of genocide and mass population transfers (and consequent loss of citizenship) during the Second World War.  This course will begin by examining the fatal gaps in the previous system of nationally instantiated ‘universal’ rights as they were initially developed in Europe and selectively applied to or adopted by its colonies.  Beginning with the pursuit of liberties in peasant communes and early modern law, we will examine the creation of national rights from the treaty of Westphalia through the British, American, and French revolutions, and the relation of these rights to colonial administration.  The post-war institutions of human rights provided a new justification for a universal and ‘open’ standard of laws and fealty (often compared to imperial Rome) and ultimately provided new legitimation for the selective intervention of stronger powers in the affairs of weaker political or legal entities.  By focusing on case studies, particularly those from the contrasting cases of the European Union and United States, the relation of human rights to hegemonic power will be examined in detail.  The course will also examine the relation of politics to the infrastructures that made both widespread human rights infractions and their curtailment possible.  The role of media (telegraph, radio, etc.), systems of organization (passports, criminal archives) and police (secret police, international monitors) will be considered as modern transnational phenomenon that are intimately connected with the development and fate of enforcing human rights norms.  The final section of the course will look at the role of international NGO’s in both monitoring human rights and criticizing the state of existing human rights law, particularly in their criticism of human rights as a product of a particular north Atlantic perspective and set of biases.

 

CRN

14283

Distribution

C

Course No.

HR 305

Title

Memories of Political Violence and Repression

Professor

Elizabeth Jelin

Schedule

Mon Wed       4:00 pm -  6:00 pm       OLIN 101

Cross-listed:  PS and LAIS

2 credits  The aim of this interdisciplinary course is to present and discuss various approaches to the study of how different societal actors, in different historical, cultural and national settings and scenarios, construct meanings and narratives of their past political violence and inter-group conflicts. It sets the cultural and symbolic construction of diverse meanings and subjective understandings in the context of quests for justice, truth and institutional changes in post-dictatorial periods. Topics will include conceptual debates and the recent experiences of Latin American societies, particularly in the Southern Cone. This is a two-credit mini-course, taught intensively in the first half of the semester. Final schedule to be announced.

 

CRN

14260

Distribution

C

Course No.

LIT 3206

Title

Evidence

Professor

Thomas Keenan

Schedule

Tu                 1:30 pm -  3:50 pm       OLIN 305

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

What does literature teach us about evidence? Of what can it be evidence?  Evidence, etymologically, is what we see, what is exposed or obvious to the eye, and to the extent that something is evident it should help us make decisions, form conclusions, or reach judgments.  Hence its legal meanings.  On the basis of these traces of what has happened —whether in the form of statistics, images, or testimony—we decide, and so their ethical and theoretical stakes are high.  Sometimes what we see and read seems to compel action, while at other times it appears to immobilize us.  As more and more of our world is exposed to view, what becomes of the would-be foundational character of evidence?  What is it to ignore evidence?  This seminar will explore the theory and practice of evidence, with special attention paid to (a) accounts in the mass media of, and (b) testimonies and forensic evidence about, the most extreme cases (genocide, atrocity, terror, human rights violations).  We will examine this literature and imagery, including much documentary material from the media, and read it all alongside contemporary literary and political theory, in order to pose some basic and complex questions about decision, bearing witness, and responsibility.  Readings and screenings from Gilles Peress, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Nancy, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Luc Boltanski, and others.

 

CRN

14414

Distribution

C

Course No.

HR 410

Title

Bhopal

Professor

Thomas Keenan

Schedule

Mon     6:30 pm – 9:00 pm          OLIN 101

Cross-listed:  Film

This intensive seminar will take the Bhopal disaster (a gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in India in December 1984, which killed 8,000 and permanently injured tens of thousands more) as a case study in human rights research. Working together with Ilan Ziv, a documentary filmmaker investigating the story, we will examine the aftermath of the event through a variety of questions. What happens when an environmental issue is recast as a matter of human rights? Why does “Bhopal” remain a powerful metaphor – and an active legal, ethical, and political issue – twenty years after the event? What sort of tensions, and possibilities, surface in the encounter between problems of globalization and corporate responsibility and the language of human rights? What role is there in cases like this for extra-legal processes such as truth commissions, and how might they be evaluated? How have trans-national advocacy networks and campaigns changed the status of Bhopal? And what is at stake when we study, research, write about, or make films about disasters like this one? We will read and watch a variety of original and secondary material, take part  in a number of levels in making a film, meet with advocates and experts, and reflect on the meanings and effects of Bhopal after twenty years.