ASSESSMENT TASKS

1. Tutorial Participation and Attendance (20%)

Due: Weekly

Details: Tutorial attendance is mandatory. Participation in tutorials involves more than just showing up. We expect students to be active participants and demonstrate that they have attended/listened to the lecture and have completed the readings. Participation also means contributing to a general atmosphere of scholarly enquiry, showing respect for the opinions of others. Thus, talking too much and not allowing other students adequate time to contribute could count against you. It is also important that you engage respectfully with your peers. Do not mock anyone’s contributions. If you don’t understand or agree with something someone says, ask them to clarify, or explain respectfully why you disagree. Everyone should feel free to speak up. If you are having trouble speaking up, please come to speak with your tutor or the course convenor privately and together we can strategize ways to facilitate your contribution.

Participation in tutorials will also entail written responses to group presentations (see below) on a form provided by the tutor. Written constructive comments will be done in class (or may be returned later to the tutor) for distribution to the presenters. They are not anonymous, so students should focus on creative feedback that genuinely helps their peers.

Again, students are expected to participate actively in discussion. If they do not; the convenor may, after one warning, institute a short written assignment (i.e., a mandatory DPG) for each tutorial, for the entire group.

A note concerning attendance of tutorials. There are 12 tutorials this semester (there is no tutorial on week 1). You can miss two tutorials without having to complete a disruption of studies request. For your first two absences, you do not need to inform your tutor or convenor that you missed a tutorial. We will account for these absences automatically. The only exception to this rule is if you must miss a tutorial in which you are scheduled to present (see below). I will only approve disruption of studies requests for missed tutorials if you have already missed two tutorials or must miss a group presentation and have extenuating circumstances.

If you miss additional tutes beyond your allotted two without an authorized excuse, your final grade will be reduced in the following manner:

1. First, since I am counting 10 tutes, each of the 10 tutes are worth 1% of your final grade. Thus, missing 5 tutes = 5% reduction.

2. If you miss six or more tutorials your final grade will be reduced an additional 10% (a 58% can turn into a 48%).

3. If you miss 7 or more tutorials I will evaluate your overall performance and assign you final grade in the unit of P or F.

2. Group Tutorial Presentation (15%)

Due: Various (See Appendix II below for schedule and topics)

Details: See below for schedule. During weeks 3, 5, 8, 9 & 12, groups of four students will do 20 to 30 minutes of presentation (2 x 10-15 minutes for pairs), followed by discussion within the class. Topics are set in advance, but students have significant latitude for group creativity. Both sides will work together for an effective presentation, as the group will be evaluated as a whole.

Students should provide the class with a one-page outline of crucial points for each perspective (though they should NOT read this to the class—Please don’t!). The class will be responsible for providing feedback as well as engaging in the post-presentation activity, whether that is debate, question and answer, or discussion of the presentation.

Students will be evaluated on the quality of the handout, the effectiveness of the presentation, the coverage of the topic, and the presentational qualities of their work (including creativity, clarity, etc.). The assessor will have some latitude to award students within the group different scores if different levels of commitment are obvious, and group members will be asked to write a self evaluation of the team and their experience.

3. Short essay assignment (15%) Due: 22 March by 23:59 (via Turnitin).

Details: The short essay is due early in the semester, and is a relatively low weight assessment so that students can quickly get feedback on their writing skills before the more heavily weighted assignments that follow. The short essay is a brief writing assignment that is designed to provoke a connection between the unit material (readings, lecture, and supplementary material) and your own experiences and thoughts. The short paper should be between 1000 and 1250 words. You will submit these through Turnitin before the deadline. The Turnitin link is in the corresponding essay folder in iLearn. The assigned topics are described below. The specific essay prompt, additional details, and other resources will be available in iLearn. This assessment task is to help the tutor to assist the student in honing the writing skills necessary for the Research essay assignment.

It is imperative that your written expression is free of grammatical and spelling errors. Papers with significant spelling and grammatical errors will be heavily penalized. Essays exceeding the 1250-word limit by more than 25 words (not including bibliography) will receive a deduction (1% for every 25 words). You must provide a word count near your title when you submit your work. Essays must connect to the concepts in the readings and lectures. High quality essays will offer a clear thesis and argument, seamlessly integrate unit material, observations concerning the issue at hand, and demonstrate the effective use of anthropological concepts. Creativity is encouraged. You are permitted to use the first person (“I observed...”, “I attended...”) in your essays. Unlike many of the sciences, anthropologists often write in the first person (because our research is strongly influenced by our presence and it is important to account for that). In this writing assignment, students will be evaluated most heavily on organization, use of data and supporting materials, clarity, and writing style. Students are not expected to do extensive outside research, but can rely on the required readings and recommended readings from the unit guide.

Cite all material you use (beyond your own thoughts, observations, and opinions). The citations style you use is up to you. I recommend Harvard: http://libguides.mq.edu.au/ content.php?pid=459099&sid=3759396

Whichever style you use, all in-text citations must be consistent and include the authors’ last name, year of publication and, if you are using a direct quote, or paraphrasing, the page number. Lectures and lecture slides can be cited as “(Vasantkumar, date)”. Direct quotations from other material should be employed judiciously. I am interested in your ability to gather, synthesize, and apply information, not in your repeating it verbatim—this especially applies with regard to lecture notes. I don’t want a simple recitation of what I have said in class, I want you to put your own intellectual stamp on the material.

The essay topics follow below in Appendix III.

4. Research essay (30%).

Due: 18 May by 23:59 (via Turnitin).

Details: Students will write a research essay for evaluation as part of this unit. The essay will be a minimum of 3000 words (maximum of 4000) and count for 30% of the final mark. The essay will be due between weeks 10 and 11.

Sample essay topics are provided in Appendix IV below, but students may also propose additional essay topics or variations on the ones offered. Students will chose their own essay topic and may do an essay on a topic related to their tutorial presentation, if they desire.

For this assignment, the instructor requires reading beyond the required readings for the topic that the student would like to investigate. No student will receive better than a passing mark if he or she has only used the required readings or webpages as additional research sources. For more details about how this assignment is assessed, see the assessment rubric at the end of this unit outline.

Some Further Advice on Anthropological Essays

As in other social science fields, students in anthropology are expected to read critically and not simply accept as ‘Truth’ what you read. You will soon discover that much of anthropology, and some of the key debates in human rights, are not disputes about facts; rather, the arguments are about how to balance competing principles when multiple, conflicting values are in play. Rather than detective work or one-sided diatribes, anthropological essays can often resemble legal or political discussions, with the facts not in dispute, but the weighting or relative importance of different ideas unclear and open to diverse readings. For example, the reason that so many people disagree about women’s rights is that they fundamentally disagree on ideals for being a woman and women’s needs. Even people from the same culture can disagree in good faith about some of the ideas we will be discussing.

Human rights themselves have often advanced through opposition of contrary viewpoints and argument; this has improved respect for and knowledge of human rights over their history. Students may want to write extremely strong language, dismissing any disagreement, ignoring good arguments that counter their own, and using inflammatory language. It is important to fight this tendency. Instead, recognition of other arguments, even when one disagrees with their perspective is an essential ingredient in activism, persuasion, and reasoned argument.

This openness to debate means that we expect your essays to demonstrate not just factual knowledge but also some ability to present and assess arguments and counter-arguments about particular problems. A good explanation of a disagreement is a better demonstration of a complete understanding of an issue than a one-sided, imbalanced account that ignores crucial reservations. Remember: debates haven’t been settled for a reason in scientific fields —we don’t expect you to be able to settle them definitively in a few thousand words.

5. Media watch portfolio (20%).

Due: Discussion of Portfolio in Tutorial, 22 May, Submission of Portfolio, 5 June in Tutorial

(based on an assessment concept by Chris Houston as adapted by Greg Downey): A media watch portfolio is a collection of texts, images, clips or memes from the media, collected over the semester, with commentary by the student. Portfolios are evaluated on the degree to which students are able to incorporate core concepts from readings and seminar discussions into analysis of news events and current events. Student marks will be assessed on the accuracy, sophistication, and rigorousness of the connections drawn between the readings from the unit and the texts found by the student.

Commentary should be typed to accompany clippings, either alone or, more commonly in groups, collected into a notebook or binder. Students will bring their portfolios, even if incomplete, to their tutorial session on 22 May, where students will exchange and discuss the resources each has collected. Over the course of the semester, the instructor would expect that a strong portfolio would contain no more than 30 clippings and around 1200 words of commentary, divided or arranged in any order that the student sees as fit.

A crucial set of questions to ask yourself as you write commentary is, what assumptions are the writers making about human rights, about the role of cultural difference in their analysis, about the interpretation of a specific right or rights, and how might an anthropologically- informed perspective reshape the terms of their argument.

This assessment task is intended to prepare students better for discussing and commenting upon current human rights-related issues, preparing them better for careers in policy, activism, and public service.

ASSESSMENT RATIONALE

To do well in this unit you will need more than just a good memory and an ability to accumulate facts. As a student you will be helped to grasp new concepts, develop analytical techniques, and improve your research skills in the field of human rights. You will be encouraged to develop your analytic capacity and your skills in written and oral communication.

In the assessments in this unit, you will be encouraged to make connections between the concerns and problems of intellectual life, and those of everyday life, both public and private. I hope that you will be encouraged to use your creativity and flexibility in problem solving when confronted by these assessment tasks, applying them to the unfamiliar and challenging environment of inter-cultural human rights. This also means, however, that you should employ materials from the unit in the assessments; failure to do so will be considered a sign that the student is unfamiliar with the materials from the unit. For example, a media portfolio that does not make explicit reference to material from both lectures and readings will be considered a sign that the student is unfamiliar with these materials, and not performing adequately with regard to expectations.

Respect for others and cross-cultural understanding, in both a local and international context, are the hallmarks of teaching and learning in the Faculty of Arts, but they are also a central set of issues for anyone working in human rights. In anthropology we focus on human rights in local contexts, in all their messy complexity when applied to real-world problems. This should encourage students to see cross-cultural differences, not merely as obstacles to creating a more just world, but as the source of concepts about universal justice and shared values.

As one of its goals for teaching and learning, the Division has set itself the task of helping you to improve your ability to work in cooperation with other members of a team. I must admit to some nervousness about team- or group-based assignments because I know that the demands placed upon you often make organizing a group to meet for these assignments very difficult. I will ask you to participate in group presentations in tutorial (see below) as a way of demonstrating how the different principles that we discuss might intersect, conflict, or build upon each other. Although this form of assessment is relatively new, I will try to make sure that the work you do to produce this cooperative presentation might be made to carry over to your individual project.

Assessment tasks and feedback procedures have been extensively redesigned in this unit to provide students with more appropriate practice of their academic skills and an opportunity to prove their learning in different media. In addition, the timetable of the assessments will allow us to return feedback to students in time for them to be able to incorporate that feedback into subsequent assessments. These are all responses to teaching evaluation and critique by participants in previous units.

(Please note: the preceding section is not original. Sections are paraphrased from several generations of statement on Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Arts. It is not represented here as my own original ideas or framework.) 

EXTENSIONS, PENALTIES, AND SPECIAL CONSIDERATION

Late submissions on any assignment will incur a penalty, unless the unit convenor has granted an extension due to certificated “unavoidable disruption” (see Undergraduate Student Handbook). The late penalty is a 5% deduction in your mark per 24-hour period.

The word limit

You will be deducted 1 percentage point for each 10 words you exceed the word limit. Please take the word limit very seriously and try to make your argument concisely and clearly. It is unfair to fellow students if one person has much more space to argue their case while another student sticks firmly to the length guidelines. The word limit is designed to level the essay- writing field, so to speak. You must provide a word count beneath the title when you submit your work. If you fail to provide a word count, you will be deducted 1 percentage point and the assessor will estimate length and mark accordingly. The word limit excludes end-of-text references but it includes footnotes and in-text citations.

No consideration for lost work or technology issues

It is the student’s responsibility to keep a copy (electronic or otherwise) of all written work submitted for each unit. No consideration will be given to claims of ‘lost work’ or technology issues no matter what the circumstances. It is your responsibility to ensure that your computer is fully compatible with iLearn during exam periods.

Returning assignments

Student work will usually be marked and returned within two to three weeks of receipt. Students who hand their work in before the due date will not have it returned early. Do not ask when marking will be finished. If you turned in you assignment late, it will likely be marked later.

Extensions and Disruption of Study:

Please view the Disruption to Studies Policy at: http://www.mq.edu.au/policy/docs/ disruption_studies/policy.html

All Disruption to Studies notifications are to be made online via the University’s Ask MQ system.

Remember, the University has determined that some circumstances routinely encountered by

students are not acceptable grounds for claiming Disruption of Studies. These grounds

include, but are not limited, to:

Routine demands of employment Routine family problems such as tension with or between parents, spouses, and other people closely involved with the student Difficulties adjusting to university life, to the self-discipline needed to study effectively, and the demands of academic work Stress or anxiety associated with examinations, required assignments or any aspect of academic work Routine need for financial support Routine demands of sport, clubs and social or extra-curricular activities

Conditions existing prior to commencing a unit of study are not grounds for Special Consideration. The student is responsible for managing their workload in light of any known or anticipated problems. The student is responsible for contacting Student Support Services if they have a chronic condition.

Remember that you can miss two tutorials without having to complete the Disruption to Studies process. This allowance is to limit the documentation burden for you, the convenor, and your tutors.

Re-mark of Work During the Semester:

A re-mark will be considered only on the following grounds:

1. Administrative error

2. The feedback provided on the assessment does not justify the grade awarded

Student Procedure: 1. The student must contact the original marker of the assessment (usually your tutor) to discuss the mark or resolve the administrative error. 2. If the marking issue cannot be resolved by the original marker, the student will email the unit convenor. This email must clearly detail the marking issue at hand.

Grade Appeals

The Macquarie Grade Appeal Policy is available here: http://mq.edu.au/policy/docs/ gradeappeal/policy.html

PLAGIARISM AND ACADEMIC HONESTY

Its fundamental principle is that all staff and students act with integrity in the creation, development, application and use of ideas and information. This means that:

*All academic work claimed as original is the work of the author making the claim. *All academic collaborations are acknowledged. *Academic work is not falsified in any way *When the ideas of others are used, these ideas are acknowledged appropriately.

The University defines plagiarism in its rules: "Plagiarism involves using the work of another person and presenting it as one's own." Plagiarism is a serious breach of the University's rules and carries significant penalties. You must read the University's definition of plagiarism and its academic honesty policy. These can be found in the Handbook of Undergraduate studies or on the web at: http://www.mq.edu.au/policy/docs/academic_honesty/policy.htm The policies and procedures explain what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, the procedures that will be taken in cases of suspected plagiarism, and the penalties if you are found guilty.

Please note that the availability of online materials has made plagiarism easier for students, but it has also made discovery of plagiarism even easier for convenors of units. We now have specialized databases that can quickly identify the source of particular phrases in a student’s work, if not original, and evaluate how much is taken from sources in inappropriate ways. My best advice to you is to become familiar with the guidelines about plagiarism and then ‘quarantine’ the files that you are actually planning on turning in; that is, do not cut and paste materials directly into any work file that you plan to submit, because it is too easy to later on forget which is your original writing and which has come from other sources. It’s so easy to avoid plagiarism: all you have to do is make sure you (a) put in quotes any words taken from another source, and (b) scrupulously reference all quotes and all statements of fact. No matter what, it’s always better to cite than to use someone else’s words without citation.

In this class I use Turnitin to detect plagiarism and I take it very, very seriously. Plagiarism will result in a mark of zero for that assignment and, depending on the severity of the plagiarism, may also result in failing the unit and/or referral to the University Discipline Committee.

Macquarie University students have a responsibility to be familiar with the Student Code of Conduct: https://students.mq.edu.au/support/student_conduct/

STUDENT SUPPORT SERVICES

Macquarie University provides a range of Student Support Services. Details of these services can be accessed at: http://students.mq.edu.au/support/

Learning Skills provides academic writing resources and study strategies to improve your marks and take control of your study: http://mq.edu.au/learningskills

IT Help: For help with University computer systems and technology, visit: http:// informatics.mq.edu.au/help/

UNIVERSITY POLICY ON GRADING

University Grading Policy

http://www.mq.edu.au/policy/docs/grading/policy.html

The grade a student receives will signify their overall performance in meeting the learning outcomes of a unit of study. Grades will not be awarded by reference to the achievement of other students nor allocated to fit a predetermined distribution. following grades:

Graded units will use the

HD High Distinction  85-100

D Distinction  75-84

Cr Credit 65-74

P Pass 50-64

F Fail 0-49

REQUIRED READINGS

All required readings are available electronically on iLearn and/or E-reserve. There is no book or reader available for purchase. If you would like a hardcopy of the readings, you are free to print these readings on your own.

UNIT WEBPAGE AND TECHNOLOGY USED AND REQUIRED

The iLearn system will be used in this unit. Check it often: http://ilearn.mq.edu.au/ 

OUTLINE OF LECTURES & READINGS

Please note that minor modifications to the readings might occur during the semester. Adequate warning will always precede these adjustments

Week 1: 27 February Introduction to Culture and Human Rights After going over the unit outline, the second hour of lecture for the first week will set out the terms, themes, and problems we address over the course of the semester. We will pay particular attention to the significance of approaching questions of rights and culture from an anthropological point of view. The characteristic task of anthropology as a discipline, many have observed, is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. In the coming weeks we will attempt to apply these strategies to such foundational concepts as culture, the human, and rights via a focus on striking case studies that unsettle our usual perceptions of the world.

No tutorial

Readings: No Required Readings for this meeting but you are strongly requested to take a look at these readings (which are required for next week’s lecture anyway):

1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) [freely available online] 2. M. Ishay (2004) What are human rights? Six historical controversies, Journal of Human Rights, 3(3): 359-371.

Week 2: 6 March The Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Historical and Intellectual Context. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, represents a moment of signal importance in the recent development of human rights discourse and practice in the West and on a broader global stage. Yet the intellectual and historical roots of the Declaration stretch deep into both Western and non- Western intellectual traditions. In this two part lecture, we will delve into both the distant philosophical antecedents and the proximate geopolitical influences that shaped the making of this important document. We will also seek to dispel several of the most persistent myths that surround its production.

Readings:

1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) [freely available online]

2. M. Ishay (2004) What are human rights? Six historical controversies,

Journal of Human Rights, 3(3): 359-371. 3. S. Waltz (2002) Reclaiming and rebuilding the history of the Universal Declaration

of Human Rights, Third World Quarterly, 23(3): 437-448.

Recommended Readings:

E. Kalny (2009) Revisiting the Debate 60 Years after the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Critique of Anthropology, 29(4): 371-395.

Week 3: 13 March Anthropology and Human Rights: What is Culture Anyway? The concept of culture, anthropology’s most successful invention, is as ubiquitous as it is poorly understood. In order to understand how common misapprehensions surrounding the concept have impacted human rights in practice, this two part lecture first traces the evolution of anthropology’s engagement with human rights from early relativist critiques such as that found in the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s 1947 Statement on Human Rights to contemporary more activist approaches. We then focus particularly on the anthropological concept of cultural relativism (the idea that no universal standards exist by which particular cultures can be compared and that each culture must thus be understood on its own terms), looking both at its usefulness in breaking down ethnocentric formulations and its limitations. Here we will look at questions surrounding the human rights status of practices of Female Genital Modification/Cutting/Ritual (FGM/FGC/FGR) as a case study.

Readings: (all but numbers 2 & 5 are very short)

1. 1947 AAA Statement on Human Rights.

2. S. Merry (2003), Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way), PoLaR, 26(1): 55-76

3. R. Shweder and F. Ahmadu (2009) Disputing the myth of the sexual dysfunction of circumcised women, Anthropology Today, 25(6): 14-17.

4. C. Londono Sulkin (2009) Anthropology, liberalism and female genital cutting, Anthropology Today, 25(6): 17-19.

5. N. Ehrenreich and M. Barr (2005) Part III. pp. 97-128 (read the rest if you have time and energy) in Intersex Surgery, Female Genital Cutting and the Selective Condemnation of “Cultural Practices,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 40: 71-140.

Recommended Readings:

A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference, Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 6-23.

M. Goodale (2006) Introduction to “Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key,” American Anthropologist, 108(1): 1-8.

T. Turner (1997) Human Rights, Human Difference: Anthropology's Contribution to an Emancipatory Cultural Politics, Journal of Anthropological Research, 53(3) 273-291.

E. Messer (1993) Anthropology and Human Rights, Annual Review of Anthropology, 22: 221-49.

M. Brown (2008) Cultural Relativism 2.0, Current Anthropology, 49(3):363-383.

Week 4: 20 March The Limits of the Human, Concepts and Case Studies What kinds of beings do discourses of human rights presume as their holders? How have concepts of what it means to be human varied by time and place? How should such variation affect our understandings of apparently universal concepts? In this lecture, we again explore two themes in parallel: those excluded from contemporary and historical ideas of rights and liberties and apparently paradoxical cases (that may include but are not limited to those conjoined twins, fetal rights and the globalization of childhood) that trouble easy common

sense visions of shared humanity. By doing so the “human” in human rights itself comes to be seen as a kind of political project.

Readings:

1. Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). Widely available online.

2. J.S. Mill (1859) On Liberty, Introduction. Available widely on the internet.

3. S. Bamford (2007) Embodiments of Detachment, pp. 80-116 in Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (Berkeley: University of California Press)

4. M. Bratton, S. Chetwynd (2004) One into two will not go: conceptualising conjoined twins, J Med Ethics, 30:279–285

Recommended Readings:

Copelon, et. al (2005) Human Rights Begin at Birth: International Law and the Claim of Fetal Rights, Reproductive Health Matters, 13(26): 120-129.

D. Rosen (2007) Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood, American Anthropologist, 109(2): 296-306.

Primary Documents

American Declaration of Independence (1776)

Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)

Week 5: 27 March Rights and their Critics, the Social Lives of a Concept This week’s lecture explores rights as culture—treating them not as given in nature or independent from human meaning-making or politics but as specific historically, socially and geographically situated cultural forms. As culturally-specific rather than inherently universal, rights generally and human rights in particular have been criticized by members of “non- Western” cultures as inappropriate for their particular situation. Objections to human rights have been made on the grounds of Asian, African, Islamic and Socialist Values. To what extent might these and other critiques be pertinent and to what extent are they based on flawed concepts of culture? How has human rights incorporated the concerns of multiple sets of actors into various generations of (blue, red and green) rights? On what basis might human rights practice proceed in the absence of a universal language of rights? These and related questions will be the central focus of this week’s meeting.

Readings:

1. P. Shipton (2003) Legalism and Loyalism: European, African, and Human Rights, in B. Dean and J. Levi, eds., At the Risk of Being Heard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). NB: Pp. 60-71 Required. Read the rest if you have time.

2. R. Williams (2006) Afterword to “Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key”: The Social Life of Human Rights, American Anthropologist, 108(1) 77-83.

3. D. Bell (1996) The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights: Reflections on an East West Dialogue, Human Rights Quarterly, 18(3): 641-667.

Primary Documents

Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990)

Bangkok Declaration — Final Declaration of the Regional Meeting for Asia of the World Conference on Human Rights (1993) — widely available online

Recommended Readings:

J. Cowan (2006) Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights, American Anthropologist, 108(1): 9-24.

L. Abu Lughod (2010) The Active Social Life of “Muslim Women’s Rights”: A Plea for Ethnography, Not Polemic, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6(1): 1-45.

Further Primary Documents

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) Banjul Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981)

Week 6: 3 April NO CLASS — Mid-semester Recess Commences

*RECESS (3 April – 19 April)*

Week 7: 24 April “Universal” Rights, Local Practices This week we look closely at efforts by human rights activists and others to translate would be “universal” rights into particular local contexts. Here we are particularly concerned with the politics of translation and with identifying the particular contribution anthropological research can make to the implementation and understanding of human rights frameworks in non-Western contexts. Ethnographic research can play a crucial role in understanding how best to bring local, translocal and would be universal knowledges and practices together. In all of this, we necessarily must examine the history and limits of the “universal” that we currently inhabit.

Readings: 

1. A. Tsing (2005) Engaging the Universal, pp. 6-10 in Friction: An Anthropology of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

2. S. Merry (2006) Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle, American Anthropologist, 108(1):38-51.

3. C. Archambault (2011) Ethnographic Empathy and the Social Context of Rights: “Rescuing” Maasai Girls from Early Marriage. American Anthropologist, 113(4): 632-643.

Primary Documents

Vienna Declaration and Program of Action (1993)

Recommended Readings:

J. Ledgerwood and K. Un (2003) Global concepts and local meaning: human rights and Buddhism in Cambodia, Journal of Human Rights, 2(4): 531-549.

M. Goodhart (2008) Neither Relative nor Universal: A Response to Donnelly, Human Rights Quarterly, 30: 183-193.

Week 8: 1 May Human Rights and Security since 9/11: Progress or Retreat? How have contemporary geo-political circumstances affected the progress of human rights? In this first of two weeks that address this question, we will explore the effects of the War on Terror on human rights since 2001. In a context of increasing global instability should rights or security be prioritized? To what degree should civil and political rights such as the freedom of speech and of assembly be protected and to what degree should they be sacrificed to ensure safety. To what degree can anti-terrorist rhetoric authorize racism or state oppression? How should human rights activists best approach such conundrums? These and related questions will lie at the center of this week’s discussion.

Readings:

1. P. Hoffman (2004) Human Rights and Terrorism, Human Rights Quarterly, 26(4): 932-955.

2. M. Mamdani (2002) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism, American Anthropologist, 104(3): 766-775.

3. D. Leyonhjelm (2014) Seven reasons to hate the Foreign Fighters Bill, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October.

4. N. O’Brien (2014) Foreign fighter laws will make Australia safer, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October.

Primary Documents

Racial Discrimination of Act of 1975 (especially section 18) Foreign Fighters Bill

Recommended Readings:

M. Clarke (2010) Widening the Net: China’s anti-terror laws and human rights in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, The International Journal of Human Rights, 14(4): 542-558.

M. Denike (2008) The Human Rights of Others: Sovereignty, Legitimacy and “Just Causes” for the “War on Terror. Hypatia, 23(2): 95-121.

L. Volpp (2002) The Citizen and the Terrorist, UCLA Law Review, 49: 1575-1600.

Week 9: 8 May Are Global Capitalism and Human Rights Compatible? In terms of economic integration, today’s world is, in some respects, radically different from that of 1948. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the rise of China over the last two decades, economic and cultural globalization have increased dramatically in intensity. Yet this increasing intensification of global linkages has not (yet) resulted in a global expansion of uniform labor rights to the world’s workers. This week we will continue our examination of the effects of the contemporary scene on human rights practices and possibilities via a thoughtful examination of the cases for and against sweatshops. Is it possible to argue for their benefits without resorting to a naive cultural relativism? Is it possible to conceptualize alternatives to the histories of western states’ own troubled economic development? To what extent should a “Right to Development” trump civil or political rights? Issues of universalism and relativism will be central to our analysis of these debates.

Readings:

1. N. Kristof and S. WuDunn (2000) Two Cheers for Sweatshops, New York Times, September 24.

2. M. Yglesias (2013) Different Places have Different Safety Rules and that’s Okay. Slate, April 24.

3. J. Collins (2007) The Rise of a Global Garment Industry and the Reimagination of Worker Solidarity, Critique of Anthropology, 27(4): 395-409

Recommended Readings:

J. Miller (2003) Why Economists Are Wrong About Sweatshops and the Antisweatshop Movement, Challenge, 46(1): 93-122.

Hong Xue and A. Chan (2013) The Global Value Chain, Critical Asian Studies, 45(1): 55-77.

B. Powell (2014) Meet the Old Sweatshops: Same as the New, Independent Review, 19(1): 109-122.

O. Nieuwenhuys (1996) The Paradox of Child Labor and Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25: 237-251.

Week 10: 15 May Global Indigeneity I: Universalism, Relativism and the Right to Difference This week we begin a discussion of what are often term third generation human rights, rights that are linked to a community rather than to an individual. In particular we explore recent articulations of indigenousness as a cultural basis for rights claims. We do so in two ways, first considering the ways in which Indigenous Rights activists may put culture to use for their particular political purposes and, second, the ways in which the idea of indigeneity itself has emerged as a particular sort of cultural form over the last several decades. Particularly worthy of note here are two ironies— the degree to which the apparent universalism of contemporary Indigenism is susceptible to the same sort of relativist critiques as universal human rights and the extent to which idealized visions of a universal Indigene have in some instances crowded the complexities of everyday life out of the picture.

Readings:

1. R. Sylvain (2002) “Land, Water and Truth”: San Identity and Global Indigenism, American Anthropologist, 104(4): 1074-185.

2. E. Yeh (2007) Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake, pp. 69-97 in O. Starn and M. de la Cadena, eds., Indigenous Experience Today (Bloomsbury Academic).

Primary Documents

1999 American Anthropological Association Statement on Human Rights United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007)

Recommended Readings:

A. Kuper (2003) Return of the Native, Current Anthropology, 44(3): 389-402. F. Merlan (2009) Indigeneity: Local and Global, Current Anthropology, 50(3): 303-333.

A. Muehlebach (2001) “Making Place” at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Cultural Anthropology, 16(3): 415-448

Week 11: 22 May Guest Lecture—Global Indigeneity II: Mabo in a Comparative Framework

Today, Dr. Greg Downey will deliver a guest lecture on the topic of indigenous land rights. Throughout the world, struggles for indigenous rights have frequently centered around control over land. In many nations, including Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Latin American countries, a long history of negotiating with indigenous peoples established legal precedents for rights to land. In Australia, however, colonial opportunism created no such precedent, officially insisting that Australia was terra nullius, empty land for the taking when it was settled by Europeans. In the Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision of 1992, over traditional land rights to Murray Island (Mer), a new precedent was set for Aboriginal territorial rights in Australia, one that is still being widely debated in both court and public opinion. The justices found that Aboriginal land rights were not automatically extinguished by colonists’ assertions that the indigenous Australians had no rights; instead, the courts found clear precedents in Common Law for Aboriginal land rights. This week we will discuss the reasoning behind both assertions of land rights and their denial, the current situation of Aboriginal land rights, and the effect on the community, both Aboriginal and Australian more broadly, of the recognition for land rights. Land rights are a classic example of collective, or ‘third generation’, rights, linked to a community rather than to specific individuals; we will ask whether community rights make for healthy communities in part by comparing the Australian experience to others around the world.

Readings:

1. H. Reynolds (1999) New Frontiers: Australia. In Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: In Australia, Canada, & New Zealand. Havemann, Paul, ed. Pp. 129-140. Auckland: Oxford University Press.

2. Hill, Ronald Paul. 1995. Blackfellas and Whitefellas: Aboriginal Land Rights, the Mabo Decision, and the Meaning of Land. Human Rights Quarterly 17(2): 303-322.

Recommended Readings:

G. Cowlishaw (1995) Did the Earth Move for You? The Anti-Mabo Debate. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 6(1-2):43-63.

E. Povinelli (1998) The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship. Critical Inquiry Winter: 575-610.

G. Blainey (1993) Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of Our History, Quadrant 37(298): 10-15.

Week 12: 29 May Human Rights and Animal Rights What, if anything, makes human beings special? What separates us from other animals? We have seen over the course of the semester how the line between the human and the non- human has been crucial to concepts of rights and liberty. We have also seen how it has been redrawn both consciously and unconsciously at particular moments in time. This week we explore the potential ramifications for human rights of the further redrawings of this distinction that may be underway at present. In particular we ask what place non-human animals might have in future constellations of human rights. We look in particular at one area where rights to cultural heritage and the concerns of the global environmentalist movement come into conflict: “traditional” hunting, whaling and other “subsistence” practices of indigenous peoples. Focusing on the whale hunt of the Makah people in America’s Pacific Northwest, we will consider how best to allocate rights in situations that navigate in uncertain fashion the boundary between human and animal rights.

Readings:

1. R. Van Ginkel (2004) The Makah Whale Hunt and Leviathan’s Death: Reinventing Tradition and Disputing Authenticity in the Age of Modernity, Etnofoor, 17(1/2): 58-89.

2. S. Kershaw (2005) In Petition to Government, Tribe Hopes for Return to Whaling Past, New York Times, September 19.

3. G. Wenzel (1991) Introduction, pp. 1-9 in Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press.)

4. seashepherd.org (2005) Makah Whaling Could Set a Dangerous Precedent, September 22.

Recommended Readings:

R. Van Ginkel (2005) Killing Giants of the Sea: Contentious Heritage and the Politics of Culture, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 15(1): 71-98.

R. Reeves (2002) The origins and character of ‘aboriginal subsistence’ whaling: a global review, Mammal Rev., 32(2): 71-106.

Week 13: 5 June What Comes After Human Rights? In the final week of the semester, we explore possible futures for human rights as imagined by both critics and supporters. Depending on whom one believes, human rights are either thriving, doomed or some combination of the two. Presenting the cases for both sides in lecture, we ask you to make your own informed decision about whether Human Rights as a project should be commended, amended, or abandoned. In particular we will explore diverging answers to the question of whether relations between Human Rights regimes and state power have become too cozy and what (if anything) would be lost by shifting to a focus on human welfare, human needs or harm mitigation as possible alternative frameworks for intervention.

Readings:

1. A. Langlois (2012) Human Rights in Crisis? A Critical Polemic Against Polemic Critics, Journal of Human Rights, 11: 558-570.

2. E. Posner (2014) The Case Against Human Rights, The Guardian, December 4.

Recommended Readings:

C. Douzinas (2014) The End(s) of Human Rights, Melb U. L. Rev., 26: 445-465. J. Zigon (2013) Human Rights as Moral Progress? A Critique, Cultural Anthropology, 28(4): 716-736

E. Posner (2008) Human Welfare, not Human Rights, Columbia Law Review, 108(7): 1758-1801.