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.