Reimagining independence: Relational selves in the Korean disability justice movement

Barclay, Linda. <i>Disability with Dignity: Justice, Human Rights, and Equal Status</i>. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. 142. $124.00 (cloth).

This case study explores the language attitudes and perceptions of Korean parents, with regard to their children’s native language maintenance and ESL education in the US. The primary focuses are on (1) what aspects are held by Korean parents toward the maintenance of the native language in the US, and (2) how these perspectives operate in their children’s language education. The data for this study includes autobiographies and in-depth interviews with two Korean mothers whose children attend a Korean language program at a Korean school in the US. The findings indicate three emerging issues, including native language maintenance, practices of language using, and identity formation. The elicited data underscores that English exceeds its meaning as a single language. For the parents, the English proficiency signifies prospective social outcomes (e.g., employment, wealth, and education) for their children’s life in the future.

Doing Disability Justice

Bioethics-CSR Divide

Reviewed by: Human Rights Discourses in a Global Network: Books beyond Borders by Lena Khor Amy Lynn Klemm Lena Khor. Human Rights Discourses in a Global Network: Books beyond Borders. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. 294p. In her original study of human rights discourse, Lena Khor addresses the concern by other scholars and critics of the globalization of human rights discourse. While [End Page 233] other scholars maintain that the discourse of human rights is being forced upon us from an imperialistic stance from what is referred to as the “Global North,” Khor argues for an exemplary move away from using human rights as a term to mean an absolute and imprecise thing, and instead she focuses on how human rights is a communally constructed language. She first broaches and explains her term “global discourse network of human rights” in the “Introduction” (Khor, 4). She devotes the first chapter to show the reader how the human rights discourse is now a global network, and delves into the language that is constructed to elucidate the human rights movement. Khor uses Paul Rusesabagina as an example of someone who has witnessed genocide and explores his autobiography An Ordinary Man as well as Terry George’s film Hotel Rwanda in her second chapter. The non-profit humanitarian outfit of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) or Doctors without Borders is presented as a proposed human rights hero/savior in the third chapter, while in the fourth chapter Khor uses Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost to illustrate the restrictions of the movement. In her Conclusion, she returns and revisits the subjects of Doctors without Borders to further highlight some of the controversies of the global human rights movement as well as the innate tensions. Throughout the entire book, it appears as though Lena Khor’s sole mission is to offer a new way of thinking about human rights through a network of global discourse and language. While there are numerous things that Khor executes very well throughout this book, this review will focus on the two which are the most successful. The first is her exploration of the ways in which scholarly criticism can oftentimes hold the cause back, and the second is that even the heroes and saviors of the cause are not above the same censure. It should also be noted that the book is formatted in such a way that it is impossible to miss Khor’s mission for her book. Each chapter is filled with italicized words and phrases that are key terms she wishes the reader to know, and the subheadings in each chapter keep the argument organized, something that is essential when tackling such a large subject matter as global human rights. Khor is breathing new life into the topic of global human rights by exploring the ways in which the language of human rights is crucial to either furthering or holding back the movement. She offers a complete overview of the difficulties in writing about and discussing global human rights, paying particular attention to the ways in which those who have witnessed genocide, such as Paul Rusesbagina, are sometimes criticized as making themselves out to be more of a hero than they really are. In the same vein, she uses Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost to draw attention to how scholarly criticism, that so often accompanies these textual works on human rights, undermines the author, the subject of the work, and any [End Page 234] personal or professional interest of the reader. Every aspect of a film, organization, or textual work is under a critical microscope to ensure that it meets the criteria that scholars feel allows it to be a reputable voice in the field. This is one of the most important things that Khor discusses, since we can only get so far in the fight for global human rights when literature, film, and organizations are being criticized by scholars and theorists who find fault in each. Critics claim that authors such as Ondaatje have a bias about the topic on which they are writing since they are from a particular area; while others claim that he is not “Sri-Lankan enough” to...

Human rights have transcended the realm of individual-state relations, becoming a constructive element of state legal systems and promoting the integration of social and legal relations, leading to the emergence of previously unknown human rights. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a legal understanding of them, considering contemporary realities. The purpose of the study is to describe and characterise the latest human rights within the framework of the general theory of law and the state. The methodological basis of the study is civilisation and socio-philosophical approaches, within which analysis, synthesis, and modelling methods were used. The essence of distinguishing generations of human rights boils down to the gradual realisation and resolution of issues of human legal status in a changing reality. Social relations, complicated by historical development, will give rise to new problems in human legal status. Attention is drawn to the close connection of human rights with the sphere of health protection, which arose as a result of scientific and technological achievements in biology and medicine, discussing rights to artificial insemination, euthanasia, organ transplantation, cloning, and gender change. The impact on fundamental human rights through the digitisation of law is analysed. The idea of the universality of human rights harmoniously interacts with the universality of digital technologies, so in the era of digitisation, the content of human rights and the related values do not change, and human rights themselves can become a unifying target perspective in determining attitudes towards new technologies. The main trends in the development of human rights in the conditions of globalisation are modelled, including the universalisation and unification of human rights, the complication of mechanisms for ensuring human rights at the international level, and the increasing importance of judicial law in protecting human rights at the supranational level. The paper focuses on the dependence of globalisation processes on transforming national legal systems in war conditions. The practical value of the study lies in its potential to incorporate the trends in human rights development within the context of globalisation into specific topics covered in courses on state and legal theory, philosophy of law, and the creation of relevant educational and methodological resources

Although the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Persons with Disability 2018 (‘African disability rights protocol’) is inspired by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2006 (CRPD), it departs from it by grounding disability rights in an African philosophy of human rights. It achieves this in various ways, particularly by assigning duties to people with disabilities, which is generally uncharacteristic of disability human rights discourse. This article explores what the allocation of these duties implies for people with disabilities. It argues that whilst such recognition may uphold the equal humanity and belonging of people with disabilities, the African disability rights protocol is not sufficiently attentive to duties owed to them by other individuals. Given the widespread exclusions and injustices faced by disabled people across Africa, it is argued that the priority should be individual duties to (rather than of) people with disabilities. The significance of individual duties to people with disabilities is not only underemphasized by the African disability rights protocol but is insufficiently addressed by the CRPD and under-theorized in disability justice literature. A duty-based approach remains a significant yet an unexplored approach to disability justice.

As an emotional ethic, caritas was taught. This chapter explores the education of children and youth in caritas through acts of care and affection by those within their community. It highlights how youth was understood as a period of imperfect knowing, excusing passionate excess in young people as they learned to develop a personal conscience—an independent self—within a society that placed significant emphasis on community relationships. Teenage romance was a particularly important opportunity for teenagers to explore how caritas was to operate as moral feeling, and this chapter notes how the growing significance of romantic love in the cultural imagination provided young people with an occasion to refigure their self in relation to the group. Yet, if some young people used this as an opportunity to contest social boundaries, evidence suggests that many young people learned their lessons in love too well, on occasion failing to notice the nuances that moderated the discipline of caritas.

The purpose of this article is to understand administrators’ personal beliefs and experiences related to inclusive education and social justice that are critical to their commitment, the leadership provided, and types of special education services that prevail in their districts. This study is embedded within a conceptual framework centered on inclusive education, and existing theoretical framings of leadership for social justice and disability studies in education. Further, it contributes to the conversation in a recent call to reimagine educational approaches in the United States that challenge systems, focus on racial and disability justice, and serve the public good. A qualitative research methodology with in-depth interviewing as the data collection method was used to understand the lived experiences and practices of seven district-level special education leaders. It specifically looks at the leaders’ drive to carry out social justice work and their overall value-based mission of socially just, equity-oriented inclusive education at the district level. It provides a research study on (1) how leaders come to carry out social justice and disability justice work in schools, (2) poignant career events that shape their justice work, and (3) their intentions to prepare under-represented and traditionally marginalized students to engage in society. The overall premise is that since district-level leaders are vital in shaping public schooling spaces, understanding their social and disability justice grounding is critical to disrupt marginalizing practices in PreK-12.

Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of Transnational Human Rights NGOs in the 1990s Jackie Smith (bio), Ron Pagnucco (bio), and George A. Lopez (bio) I. Introduction This paper summarizes the results of a mailed survey sent to nearly 300 transnational human rights organizations, of which more than half responded. The survey was designed to identify the geographic distributions of human rights organizations, their political activities, their work with international agencies, their organizational structures and resources, their links with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and their definitions of human rights goals. This study is part of a larger project to better understand how the work of transnational human rights NGOs influences global political and social change. [End Page 379] A. Background 1 Research on the development of international human rights law and institutions has identified the crucial role played by nongovernmental agents in defining international human rights norms, developing institutional mechanisms to ensure adherence to international norms, and monitoring national and local human rights practices. In recent years, researchers have made more concerted efforts to understand how NGOs operate and interact with other global actors to promote changes in local and global policies. 2 This research grows in part from the observation that a growing number of NGOs are engaging in international political activities. An increasing number of these groups are organized across national boundaries. This study is directed toward a better understanding of the work being done by transnational human rights NGOs. Much of the existing research on transnational human rights NGOs consists of: case studies of individual organizations working for human rights; 3 comparative studies of a select number of organizations; 4 studies of the work of human rights organizations and institutions in specific countries or regions; 5 and studies of the political processes surrounding human rights standard-setting and enforcement. 6 This study complements previous research [End Page 380] with a systematic survey of the population of transnational human rights NGOs, addressing questions about how these groups are organized and how they seek to influence global human rights work. The survey was intended to help answer, in a systematic way, a series of questions involving the array of transnational human rights NGOs, their locations, resources, structures, and memberships. Special emphasis was placed on the distribution between the Global North and South, and whether these transnational human rights NGOs are mass-based organizations with many individual members or, rather, are comprised largely of small professional staffs. There is an underlying assumption that the structure and the configuration of organizations within the movement will have important consequences for the human rights movement’s goals, strategies, and impacts. In addition, the mandates of these NGOs were compared, with emphasis on the difference in the goals on which these NGOs focus and the categories of rights that are receiving their attention. It will be interesting to see what these differences reveal about the human rights movement. What are the strategies and activities of international human rights NGOs? Is there some kind of specialization or division of labor among them? Do all the groups work with international institutions? How much attention does the human rights movement devote to public education on human rights, standard-setting, implementation, and enforcement? What do the differences in activities tell about the human rights movement? How fragmented and competitive are the NGOs? Is this a diffuse and uncooperative human rights movement, or is there some degree of integration and cooperation? Below follows a description of some of the broad characteristics of international human rights NGOs in an attempt to begin to answer these questions. B. The Survey The survey used in this study was developed in consultation with human rights advocates, scholars of international human rights politics, and researchers familiar with organizational surveys. 7 Several items in the survey [End Page 381] build upon previous studies of national social change organizations such as those John McCarthy has made of US-based organizations working to combat drunken driving 8 and to promote empowerment of the poor. 9 It also builds upon a survey of national and local US-based peace movement organizations 10 and a broad study of US voluntary associations by Dennis Young and colleagues. 11 Relying on previous studies...

This article analyses Taiwan’s human rights treaty review process (2009–2022), examining an underexplored dilemma: the presumed tension between reproductive autonomy and disability justice. Since incorporating most core international human rights conventions into domestic law, Taiwan has created a distinctive monitoring arena that brings governmental agencies, advocacy groups, and international experts into dialogue. Drawing on documentary and discourse analysis, we show how abortion debates involving foetal impairment have been negotiated, obscured, or strategically silenced in these fora. Although treaties such as CEDAW and CRPD enshrine both reproductive and disability rights, legal and medical narratives continue to frame abortion in ways that affirm autonomy while also reinforcing ableist assumptions. Civil society organisations have advanced the reproductive health and rights of women with disabilities but largely avoided their underlying tensions. We consider this avoidance a strategic omission reflecting the difficulty of reconciling competing claims without a shared interpretive framework. To move beyond the false opposition between abortion rights and disability existence, we propose a harmonising approach centred on the notion of a liveable life as a common foundation, on which the agency of all persons, disabled or not, is enabled across infrastructural, institutional, symbolic, and interpersonal dimensions of reproductive decision-making.

How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations.

No Iso-Fix for Human Rights: a Critical Perspective on Iso 2600 Guidance on Social Responsibility

The causal relationship between mental construal level and ingroup bias remains elusive. This paper uncovers a boundary condition and a mechanism underlying the relationship. We predict and find support for our hypotheses in four experiments conducted in East Asian and Western cultures. Data showed that a high- (vs. low-) level construal activated state belongingness, but had no effect on state rejection, state self-esteem, positive emotion, or negative emotion in participants from Korea (Experiment 1) and Australia (Experiment 3). Moreover, a high- (vs. low-) level construal triggered greater ingroup bias for Koreans (Experiment 2) and Australians (Experiment 3) primed with a relational self, but not for those primed with an independent self. This construal level effect on ingroup bias was eliminated when belongingness was primed at both a high- and a low-level construal; instead, relationals under a low-level construal were more ingroup-biased when they were primed with a belongingness (vs. baseline) condition (Experiment 4). These findings highlight that the relational self is a boundary condition for the construal level-ingroup bias link; belongingness explains the relationship.

The UN Decade for Human Rights Education began in 1995, and since that time many nations have reported activities and programs in line with the decade (United Nations 1998; UNHCHR 2005). While 1995 was a pivotal year in the history of human rights education, the curricular movement neither began nor ended with the UN Decade. Human rights education has been developing for several decades, and efforts to introduce human rights into formal school curricula have included diverse and ongoing activities by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and dedicated individuals throughout the world. Beyond advocating for human rights education in schools, the actors involved in promoting human rights education also have been involved in creating and developing a curricular movement. This article builds on previous comparative education research by analyzing the current discourse surrounding this emerging education model— human rights education. The first section provides a brief history of human rights education in formal education. The second section reviews research on international reforms, emphasizing analyses of processes in global diffusion and variation at national or local levels. Closely related, the third section discusses linkages and relational and associational processes that spread ideas and construct new models such as human rights education. The fourth section focuses on the current state of human rights education, ex-