Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights

This essay will serve as both a synthesis of and reflection upon your journey into the terrain of human rights. It will invite you to stage a meeting between:

1)   one or more characters from a primary text or film;
2)   one or more theorists or historians of human rights from our secondary readings; and
3)   you.

The subject of the meeting should be a human rights problem, and the conversation should reflect the views, positions, and experiences of the participants on that

problem.

Example: The problem of state sovereignty in conflict with international human
rights norms

Participants: Little Bee, Lawrence, Sarah, and Jami + Hannah Arendt and Costas
Douzinas

Topics: Movement across borders; the right to asylum; the international
economic system and its relation to violations of human rights; the
suffering of displaced persons v. the security needs of states

Please consider issues of form and voice before you begin. What form will your meeting take? A regular academic paper describing the meeting?A script that brings the

dialogue to life?A short story? What voice(s) will you use; from whose perspective will you speak? Will you bring each character to life, or will you have a narrator

to describe the proceedings? This is your chance to exercise your creativity, your intellectual curiosity, and your knowledge. See where those take you—hopefully

into uncharted terrain that will be exciting and substantive both for you and for your reader.

Length requirement: 7-10 pages
Criteria for evaluation: Engagement with course texts/themes
Accuracy of material
Excellence and originality in form
Depth of evidence used to support your ideas
Excellent organization, structure, syntax, grammar, punctuation.

Primary texts:
•   “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden (poem on front page of syllabus)
•   The Blue Notebook, James Levine
•   Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman
•   Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Rory Kennedy
•   Little Bee, Chris Cleave
•   Sweet Crude
•   Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April

Secondary texts:
•   Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People”Paul Gordon Lauren, Chapter 1, “My Brother’s and Sister’s Keeper”
•   Paul Gordon Lauren, Chapter 7, “Proclaiming a Vision”
•   Costas Douzinas, Are Rights Universal?
•   Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights
•   Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro”
•   Alison Brysk, From Human Trafficking to Human Rights
•   Siddarth Kara, “The Business of Modern Slavery”
•   Elaine Scarry, “The Structure of Torture”
•   Marguerite Feitlowitz, “A Lexicon of Terror”
•   Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden’s Haunting Relevance
•   Ariel Dorfman, Letter to the American People
•   Elaine Scarry, “Five Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz
•   Costas Douzinas, Rights, Law, Morality
•   David Weissbrodt, “UN Perspectives on Business, Humanitarian, and Human Rights Obligations”
•   Democracy Now: Massive Casualties Feared”
•   Democracy Now: Shell to Pay Out $15.5 million
•   Shell Oil: Shell Settles Wiwa Case with Humanitarian Gesture
•   Shell Oil on Ken SaroWiwa
•   Sharon Sliwinski, “Genocide, Again, 1992” Chapter 5
•   Gerald Kaplan, “From Rwanda to Darfur”

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