(Re)Capturing Human Rights Literacies: Starting Conversations

Abstract

In this chapter the positioning of the need for change in unique place-space-time is posited. Positioning human rights literacies and its possible ‘unpredictable processes’ of disruption in place-space-time is part of the bottom up scenario if human rights want to be relevant in a changing global environment. The change needed concerns issues of diversity, difference, othering, marginalisation and violence. These are related to histories, cultures of remembrance and the lived realities in the gap between human rights ideals and (non)realisation of human rights in place-space-time. Human rights literacies are structured through subjectification within the gap between the ideals of human rights and the (non)realisation of rights in everyday life. The paradoxes of learning human rights are inherent to the “myth of pedagogy” (Biesta, The beautiful risk of education, 2013, p. 98). This myth holds that the learner, as the unequal and ignorant party, should learn about human rights from a person in authority who is knowledgeable. Learning happens through socialisation discourses which focus on consensus and which also enable the continual construction of the failed subject. The inability of education and human rights education to enable subjectification within learnification (Biesta, The beautiful risk of education, 2013) and socialisation discourses reinforce this. The possibilities of human rights literacies rest in notions of change enacted by the subjects of rights in becoming who live human rights every day in their unique place-space-time and who, through processes of subjectification, act as subjects of rights.