19597

HR / ANTH 233 Problems in Human Rights

John Ryle

M . W . .

12:00-1:20 pm

ASP 302

SSCI

This course approaches a set of practical and ethical human rights issues through the study of historical and contemporary campaigns, starting with the British anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. The emphasis is on practical questions of strategy and organization and the problems that arise from these. What were the challenges that early campaigners faced? How did they resolve them?  What alliances of interest did they confront? And what coalitions did they form to combat them? The course also considers how human rights campaigners have engaged with - and been part of - wider political, religious and economic changes. It examines the negotiations and compromises that led to a key event in the twentieth-century human rights history: the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Has the subsequent success of the human rights movement - particularly the expansion of international human rights legislation - changed its character?  The course examines the landmine ban campaign, the campaign against female genital cutting and the campaign against child soldiers - and considers the ideological challenges these issues present to the international human rights regime. When, if ever, are indigenous values more important than universal principles? What is the relation of human rights to religious values? Is human rights itself a quasi-religious belief system? Finally the course considers some contemporary challenges facing the human rights movement: the return of slavery and slave-like practices and the question of genocide in Darfur, in particular the role of the International Criminal Court. 

19138

HR 235 Dignity & Human Rights Traditions: A New Law on Earth

Roger Berkowitz

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Political Studies, HRP core course, (PIE Core Course) We live at a time when the claim to human rights is both taken for granted and regularly disregarded. One reason for the disconnect between the reality and the ideal of human rights is that human rights have never been given a secure philosophical foundation. Indeed, many have argued that absent a religiously grounded faith in human dignity, there is no legal ground for human rights. Might it be that human rights are simply well-meaning aspirations without legal or philosophical foundation? And what is dignity anyway? Ought we to abandon talk about dignity and admit that human rights are groundless? Against this view, human rights advocates, international lawyers, and constitutional judges continue to speak of dignity as the core value of the international legal system. Indeed, lawyers in Germany and South Africa are developing a "dignity jurisprudence" that might guarantee human rights on the foundation of human dignity. Is it possible, therefore, to develop a secular and legally meaningful idea of dignity that can offer a ground for human rights? This class explores both the modern challenge to dignity and human rights as well as attempts to resuscitate a new and more coherent secular ideal of dignity as a legally valid guarantee of human rights. In addition to texts including Hannah Arendt's book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, we read legal cases, and documents from international law.

19598

HR/ ARTH 240 Observation and Description

Gilles Peress

. T . Th. . .

10:30 am-11:50 am

OLIN 306

SSCI

Cross-listed: Art History, Human Rights Core Course We will study the observation and description of reality as a fundamental and daunting problem for human rights. Pain, violence, victimization, and injustice have long been a part of human reality.  Can we change, or are we doomed to repeat ourselves and kill and torture one another until the end of time?  The answer is not obvious. But one thing is certain: as long as we stay in the cave, in obscurity, and only look at shadows, we are not going to resolve this conundrum. Going into the world, trying to look at it and describe it, is the only way for us to escape that cavern of ideology, of disempowering shadows and ghosts. And while there is no such a thing as truth or objectivity, this process of trying to understand what we see, how we see it and how to describe it, brings us closer to a resolution -- by action -- of this fundamental question. In order to reach the point of rawness where we reformulate for ourselves what observation and description are, we must escape the predicament and predictability of known methods and forms.  We need to position ourselves in a no-man’s land, beyond traditional specializations in knowledge and practice. In this seminar, we are out to re-appropriate reality, to get at perception before it has been shaped as expression, to see images in the heart and eye before they harden as categories, styles, definitions -- and if it is possible to do so, to reconcile the layers of meanings and to pull from all these contradictions some organized process, where the documentary act begins.  We will focus on visual awareness, not as an illustration of ideas, but as a seed for ideas in themselves. We will try, through examples and assignments, to investigate how non-professionals can use not only current technologies but also new visual attitudes, so that reports and communications can escape their usual dreariness, so that human rights reporting can be formalized in such a way as to escape its own ghetto and be made attractive, visually and emotionally engaging to the largest possible audience.

19513

HR 257 Human, all-too Human Rights

Olivia Custer

. T . . .

1:30 pm – 3:50 pm

PRE 101

HUM

This course will start from Friedrich Nietzsche's suspicions that compassion for the suffering and talk of equality harbor a project not to promote life, but to destroy it. To help us reflect on how we might extend what we learn from Nietzsche to the contemporary scene, we will be looking to two thinkers who precede us this attempt: Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Both of them follow Nietzsche, to a certain extent, when they take on the task of tracking the methods and the sites of the violence involved in producing the figure of the human being, bearer of human rights. Nevertheless Derrida and Foucault have their quarrels and they do offer diverging diagnostics of the predicament of those who call themselves human today. We will look at each of these as we attempt to understand who it is exactly we would mourn if man were indeed, as Foucault suggested, a figure in the sand shortly to be washed out by the sea, and what possibilities there might still be for affirming the survival of human rights. Our emphasis will be on acquiring the skills, and the ear, to ask a variant of Nietzsche's question: what is the value of the value of human rights? Focusing on close analysis, the readings will be almost exclusively drawn from the works of Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida.

19267

HR / LIT 218 Free Speech

Thomas Keenan

. T . Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

HDR 302

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights Program (core course) An introduction to the intersections between literature and human rights, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, hate speech and censorship on the Internet. The course will examine the ways in which rights, language, and public space have been linked together in ideas about democracy. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do with literature. Why have poetry and fiction always been privileged examples of freedom and its defense? What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what? Is an encounter with the fact of language, which belongs to no one and can be appropriated by anyone, at the heart of democracy? In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, we will ask about the ways in which the subject of rights, and indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives from a 'literary' experience. These questions will be examined, if not answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political texts, including case studies and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Spivak, Fish, Agamben). The class will take place jointly, via video link, with a seminar at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia.

19595

HR 329 Cosmopolitanism to Globalization: World Citizen from Kant to Samir Amin

Robert Weston

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLINLC 208

SSCI

Before the solidification of the nation state, Immanuel Kant laid out in his remarkable vision of Perpetual Peace, a world community governed by a single global authority and inhabited by "citizens of the world." From its inception in the most progressive strains of the European Enlightenment, Cosmopolitanism has been concerned with anchoring the regulatory function of social institutions to basic notions of human rights. With the rise of transnational networks for the flow of capital, labor, and information—and with the emergence of post-national migrant and diasporic communities—the idea of "new cosmopolitanisms" has assumed a prominent place in contemporary discussions of political philosophy, post-colonial theory, globalization, world-systems analysis and human rights. In this course we will explore how ideas of cosmopolitanism develop from the late Enlightenment through the most recent debates. Readings range from eighteenth-century authors such as Kant, Lessing and Goldsmith to contemporary theorists such as Amin, Appiah, Appadurai, Beck, Benhabib, Bhabha, Chakrabarty, Cheah, Derrida, Hobsbawm, Spivak, Waldron and Wallerstein.

(See primary areas for descriptions.)

19216

ANTH 213 Anthropology of Medicine

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI

19214

ANTH 265 Race & Nature in Africa

Yuka Suzuki

. T . Th .

10:30 am-11:50 am

OLIN 303

SSCI

19604

ANTH 268 War, Culture, Politics and Religion in Sudan

John Ryle

M. W . .

4:30 pm –5:50 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI

19223

ANTH 332 Cultural Technologies of Memory

Laura Kunreuther

M . . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

OLIN 308

SSCI

19503

DAN 255 Dance, the Body, Social Action

Mark Franko

M . W . .

1:30pm – 3:30 pm

AVERY 217

AART

19571

DAN 265 The Choreographic Public Sphere

Mark Franko

. . W . .

4:30 pm –6:50 pm

RKC 200

AART

19546

ES 101 Introduction to Environmental Studies

Yuka Suzuki

. T . Th .

1:00 pm-2:20 pm

OLIN 204

SSCI

19120

HIST 1001 Revolution

Robert Culp / Gregory Moynahan

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

RKC 102

HIST

19123

HIST 102 Europe from 1815 to Present

Gennady Shkliarevsky

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLINLC 210

HIST

19117

HIST 2112 The Invention of Politics

Tabetha Ewing

. . W . F

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 101

HIST

19276

HIST / SOC 213 Immigration and American Society

Joel Perlmann

. T . Th .

4:00 pm -5:20 pm

OLIN 203

HIST

19107

HIST 2356 Native Peoples of North America

Christian Crouch

M . W . .

12:00 pm -1:20 pm

OLIN 204

HIST/DIFF

19270

HIST 3144 Women. Gender, and Political Media

Tabetha Ewing

. . W . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 308

HIST

19380

SOC/ HIST 329 Irish & Germans in America, 1830-1930: Immigration and Ethnicity

Joel Perlmann

. . W . .

4:20 pm -6:40 pm

OLIN 205

SSCI

19004

LIT / ASIA 205 Representations of Tibet

Li-Hua Ying

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLINLC 120

ELIT/DIFF

19542

LIT 276 The Holocaust and Literature

Norman Manea

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

19155

PHIL 260 Feminist Philosophy

Daniel Berthold

. T . Th .

9:00 -10:20 am

OLIN 201

HUM/DIFF

19183

LIT 3033 Toward (A) Moral Fiction

Mary Caponegro

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

19281

LIT 358 Exile & Estrangement in Modern Fiction

Norman Manea

M . . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

19155

PHIL 260 Feminist Philosophy

Daniel Berthold

. T . Th .

9:00 -10:20 am

OLIN 201

HUM/DIFF

19161

PHIL 357 Law and Ethics

William Griffith / Alan Sussman

. T . . .

9:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 304

19244

PS 104 International Relations

Jonathan Cristol

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLIN 204

SSCI

19130

PS 218 Theories of the Self, Gender, and Anti-Racism

Elaine Thomas

. T . Th .

1:00 pm -2:20 pm

OLIN 308

SSCI

19245

PS 330 Politics of Democratization

Omar Encarnacion

. T . . .

9:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 301

SSCI

19585

PS 358 Radical American Democracy

Roger Berkowitz

. T . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

RKC 200

SSCI

19146

REL 261 Women in Buddhism

Kristin Scheible

. T . Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 203

HUM/DIFF

19147

REL 344 Buddhist Ethics

Kristin Scheible

. . W . .

9:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 302

HUM

19151

SOC 242 Historical Sociology of Punishment

Michael Donnelly

M . W . .

12:00 pm -1:20 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI/DIFF

19232

SOC 246 Race & Ethnicity: Key Concepts

Amy Ansell

. T . Th .

1:00 pm -2:20 pm

OLIN 301

SSCI/DIFF

19284

SOC 254 Social Movements

Roberto Velez-Velez

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLINLC 118

SSCI

19150

SOC 304 Contemporary Sociological Theory

Michael Donnelly

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLIN 307

SSCI

19153

SOC 332 Seminar on Social Problems

Yuval Elmelech

.T . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI/DIFF