Human Rights

Abstract

Scholarship addressing the geography of human rights— the geographical analysis of the ways cultures conceive of justice and understand just behavior—improves both our understanding of human rights and our understanding of geography. A full understanding of struggles over human rights requires a geographical perspective, a consideration of the contexts in which the struggles occur. Conceptualizations of human rights and the abuse of human rights do not just happen. They are the products of human action in particular cultural and environmental settings. They are place-based and socially constructed, products of processes not only tied to place but also altering the significance of place. Human rights scholarship that omits geographical background and geographical consequences misses the target because it fails to capture both the cultural struggles over what a just society is and the milieu of interrelated sites of injustice. If geographical research addressing oppression does not explicitly address human rights, then virtually by definition such work does so implicitly. At its core, human rights scholarship addresses oppression. Hence, such geographical scholarship as the work of Knopp (1997) addressing gay rights and of Monk (1998) addressing women’s rights fits into the scope of the geography of human rights in America. To fulfill its potential as a scholarly discipline examining the human condition, geography needs to focus on human rights. The spotlight of geographic education’s five themes—place, location, region, nature–society relations, movement—should be focused on what truly matters in people’s lives, including human rights. Likewise, the study of human rights, with its vexing examination of rights and wrong, needs the nuanced sensitivity of geography, with its study of cultural and environmental contexts. To wit, geography needs human rights and human rights needs geography. Geographical research that has been done or is in progress explains why. Indeed, the roster of former presidents of the Association of American Geographers contains many individuals whose professional and personal lives were committed to the furtherance of human rights. Among them are such luminaries as Richard Hartshorne, Harold Rose, Gilbert White, Julian Wolpert, and Richard Morrill, each of whom struggled for the advance of human rights in his personal life as well as his scholarly work.