Representations Of Human Rights Research Articles

Debating the legal recognition of gender identity in parliamentary discourse: Human rights and queer politics

This study documented the rhetorical constructions of ‘human rights’ in political discourse and the potential implications of their invocation as a frame for LGBTQI+ claims. The minutes of the VI Greek Parliamentary session on a bill related to the legal recognition of gender identity, conducted in 2017, were analyzed. Analysis utilized the concepts of Rhetorical and Critical Discursive Social Psychology, indicating that human rights are flexibly used in arguments oriented to the expansion, the limitation, or the opposition to self-defined gender identity. Varied representations of human rights’ content and boundaries and different constructions of agency concerning their enactment are identified. Although representations of human rights as universal are oriented to the inclusion of LGBTQI+ community, other liberal arguments obscure anti-LGBTQI+ social actors’ accountability. Human rights are also depicted as threatening Westernizing tools. The rhetorical functions of these constructions and their potential implications for queer claims and politics are discussed.

From management to student

The paper presents the results of research on human rights conducted during 2018 and 2019 at faculties of teacher education and studies of psychology, pedagogy, and social work in Croatia. The aim of the research was to examine the representation of human rights learning outcomes in these studies, with a special emphasis on children’s rights, children’s participation, and the concept of the child as an active citizen, common in the discourse of the contemporary childhood paradigm. The research was conducted by using the mixed methods approach. Triangulation with three different sources of respondents was applied: a survey with university teachers, interviews with representatives of study programs, and a survey with students, where all types of data in the analysis were treated as equal. Different types of data showed unequal perspectives between institutional actors, but also similarities of the university population with other levels of the education system.

Symposium: Drawing the Human

What does it mean to be human today in our globalised, technologised and hypermediated world? How do our modes of cultural representation relate to, affect and effect the role of being human? This special issue of Law, Technology and Humans seeks to explore the form of the comic as one means to address these questions. Comics are a means of cultural representation and discourse that not only reflect but refract — through their deployment of word and image, of grid and gutter, of both visual and textual mediation — the very means of human interaction and intersubjectivity. Arising out of the 2019 Graphic Justice Research Alliance conference, hosted by the School of Law and Criminology (now the School of Law and Society) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, the papers collected here examine not only the way in which comics and graphic art present narratives of law and justice, or representations of human rights and their abuses, but also the way in which comics in their form and multimodality call into question the law’s drawing of the boundaries of the human as it is challenged by its relation to the non-human, the environment and technology.

Representaciones sociales y reconocimiento de los derechos humanos en la ciudad de Monterrey, México

Este artículo se centra en las representaciones sociales de los derechos humanos en los medios de comunicación mexicanos, en la ciudad de Monterrey, México. Analiza cómo los ciudadanos de Monterrey aprenden sobre los derechos humanos y qué papel podrían desempeñar diferentes fuentes en su construcción de representaciones sociales. Además, investiga el reconocimiento y conocimiento del tema por parte de estos ciudadanos. El análisis se basa en encuestas N239 recopiladas de lectores de noticias de Monterrey, complementadas con datos de veinticuatro participantes en cuatro grupos focales. Las conclusiones confirman que los medios de comunicación son la principal fuente de información sobre los derechos humanos, pero que existe una representación social débil y fundada sobre los derechos humanos. Las actitudes son a menudo fatalistas, y los participantes tienen un conocimiento limitado de cómo actuar sobre los derechos humanos.

Reflections on the Limitations Imposed by the Zimbabwean State's Essentialist Interpretation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Identity on Yvonne Vera's Representation of Human Rights in The Stone Virgins

AbstractYvonne Vera's novel The Stone Virgins (2002) stands out as a courageous text that questions the Zimbabwean state's use of violence and an ethnically exclusivist nationalist ideology in its pursuit of a one‐party state objective between 1982 and 1987. This article argues that subtle intimidation through the articulation of a violent postcolonial nationalist discourse and the state's deployment of a military unit and other instruments of coercion might have forced Vera into self‐censorship in her representation of the ‘Gukurahundi’ atrocities in the provinces dominated by the ethnic Ndebele minority. Furthermore, the discursive limitations imposed by the dominant ideology of paternalist Shona nationalism, the need to avoid persecution by the state, and to narrativize the national memory of a painful and emotive history, compromised her objectivity in the representation of culpability for the genocide.

Negotiating Human Rights in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia

This essay examines the interpretations of 16th-century and present-day human rights found within Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 film También la lluvia. I argue, firstly, that central to the film is the question as to whether human rights can foster justice and contest the cruelty of (neo)colonialism or if, conversely, they are designed and/or doomed to reinforce colonizing relationships and, secondly, that an interpretation of the film’s ambiguous response might contribute to recent criticism regarding the imperializing tendencies and emancipatory potential of human rights culture. By exploring the film’s self-reflexive and critical considerations of the violence human rights have caused as well as its treatment of spaces in which these rights bring about adaptations, inversions, and transformations of colonizing relationships, I propose that the film can be understood to reimagine human rights culture. In order to interpret the film’s representation of human rights, my article identifies and analyzes the processes of negotiation by which the relationship between rights and colonialism is revealed to be an unstable and malleable one, continually subject to change and in need of criticism that takes its adaptive character into account.

Hollywood’s Africa after 1994

In this book, Mary Ellen Higgins, who has numerous previously published essays on the literary and cinematic representations of human rights, has brought together fifteen intriguing essays by a multidisciplinary community of contributors to examine Hollywood’s representations of Africa. Their historical starting point—1994, the year of the genocide in Rwanda—stems from how that event captured the attention of human rights activists and Hollywood celebrities to yield a symbiosis of sorts in which Hollywood made human rights films and activists saw film as a means to motivate viewer campaigns against human rights violation. These recent films have human rights issues as their “major thrust” but oftenmix the issues withHollywood’s bequeathed legacy of “colonial” tropes that cast Africa as dangerous, exotic, and savage, and render the people and places of the continent as amere backdrop forWestern protagonists and perspectives. The films discussed range in the book from big-budget studio productions to independent and transnational outputs that engage with Hollywood’s legacies. The films are Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Edward Hick’s Blood Diamond, Kevin Macdonald’s Last King of Scotland, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s The Devil Came onHorseback, Phillip Noyce and TomHooper’s Red Dust andCatch a Fire, Darell Roodt’s Dangerous Ground and Cry the Beloved Country, Neil Blompkamp’s District 9, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Anton Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands With the Devil, Fernando Meirellis’s The Constant Gardener, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Newton Aduaka’s Ezra, and Mahmet Selah-Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa. The book’s driving question is: How can Hollywood’s Africa be characterized after 1994 and how has this been challenged, changed, and/or updated? In other BOOK REVIEW

¿Quién responde por la formación de los docentes como sujetos de derechos en las facultades de educación?

This reflection article, derived from a research process about social representations of Human Rights in a group of students, explores the process of knowledge and experience that undergraduate students from Universidad Distrital have during their training process to become teachers. It shows how the field of social representation originates in the daily life experiences of students (both in the university and beyond) where they become aware of Human Rights violation experiences. They begin to question the meaning, significance, usefulness and pur pose of rights in the contexts of societies like Colombia and particularly, in a Faculty dedicated to the teacher training. Likewise, the lack of a political will to make Human Rights Education (HRE) more visible and tangible in the curricula for future teachers is questioned, as well as the educational projects in Faculties of Education. Finally, the paper suggests some key ideas to enhance future teachers’ training from a HRE perspective.

Le rôle de l’implication et des systèmes de croyances au sein des représentations sociales

The study presented in this article concerns the functioning of representational mechanisms in social thought. More specifically, its objective is to identify the role of variables covering psychosocial involvement and systems of belief within social representations. At the interface between the individual and the group, these variables are considered here because of their status as explanatory variables of social thought. By analyzing the representation of human rights, we hypothesize that the level of involvement and the type of beliefs developed toward the state (concepts of a democratic state versus a safe state) impact on the expression of this representation and the standpoints it creates. The survey was conducted by questionnaire with a student population (315 participants). The main results, which are consistent with our hypotheses, provide evidence of an influence of the variables tested on the expressiveness of the representation of human rights. On the one hand, they reveal how an involvement developed in this subject and the social beliefs attached to the role of the state come to particularize the meaning of this representation, especially concerning its principles of equality. On the other hand, the results demonstrate the activity of ideological processes – political in content – which intervene in the realization of the representation. Through these processes, the results show a stronger influence of social beliefs than of psychosocial involvement on the representation studied.

The Representation of Human Rights and Economic Positions in Cuba

This article describes the more than a decade–long process, during which Cuba, having lost its economic stability, has been economically moving closer to EU countries that are investing more and more in tourism and other industries. Although in many areas a shift towards a market economy can be observed in Cuba, these measures have not been accompanied by political reforms and guarantees of basic human rights that are considered fundamental values in the European Union. The article introduces the efforts of the Cuban opposition and organizations over the last twenty years, and describes the steps, with which the European Union has supported and recognized those who are fighting for freedom and rights in Cuba. Through these actions the European Union makes it clear that besides improving economic relations, the EU emphasizes and monitors the political systems of its trading partners, expecting them to guarantee certain basic rights.

Media discourses in Hong Kong: change in representation of human rights

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5,000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair's (Textus 9: 75–106, 1996, Trust the text, Routledge, 2004) lexical item. The analysis of instances of the phrase ‘human rights’ in the corpus as a lexical item shows that the newspaper in question has changed its representation of human rights issues, particularly in China and Hong Kong, over the decade. This reflects an ideological shift in the newspaper's stance in response to the current situations in both local and world politics, and that human rights concerns are not merely a nationalistic, but also a culturally dynamic phenomenon.

Too distant shores: the Strait of Gibraltar and the space of exception

Focusing on The Sheep and the Whale (Le mouton et la baleine, 2001) by Moroccan-Canadian playwright Ahmed Ghazali, this essay examines political and ethical issues concerning human migration from Africa to Europe. The play's representation of human rights abuses in the Strait of Gibraltar and the dilemmas facing illegal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers will be situated in relation to current debates about the state of exception and the new forms of neo-liberal governmentality employed under the conditions of globalisation. In one way, Ghazali's drama pays homage to those trying to enter Fortress Europe – and specifically to the nameless young African bodies washed up on the shores of southern Spain. It attempts, in part, to exorcise the unspoken violence of these people's deaths in what has become a vast African cemetery, while prompting us to ask what can be done in order to reduce the death toll in the Gibraltar Strait.

Anthropology and Cinema: Visual Representations of Human Rights, Displacement and Resistance in Come Back Africa, by Lionel Rogosin

This article is devoted to reevaluating the anthropological importance of the work of Lionel Rogosin, whose films, like those of Jean Rouch and Robert Flaherty before him, reflect a symbiosis between cinema and visual research. Focused on apartheid, civil rights, and displacement, his filmmaking activity includes such important titles as Come Back Africa [2004], on the apartheid in South Africa during the 1950s, and On the Bowery [1956], located in inner-city New York in the 1960s. I believe his work should be positioned within anthropology and cinema, and analyzed for use of an approach of the “participant camera.”

The philosophical implications of research on the social representations of human rights

The aim of this article is to show how human rights can be the object of another politics than the one Marcel Gauchet denounces as an “egalitarian ethnocentrism” and regards as grounding a “democratic counter-productivity”. Drawing upon the research developed by Willem Doise and his colleagues, we show that human rights, when they become social representations, rather than generating a society of undifferentiated individuals, allow the individual and collective differences to position themselves around a common stake. In this sense, the construction of shared social representations is an essential condition for the democratization process in our societies. We show how the use of human rights in the context of the French quarrel over the Muslim hijab has contributed to a gradual transformation of human rights into practical and representational matrices for the development of a truly democratic debate. Finally, the article addresses the need to reflect upon the conditions allowing the establishment of these social representations.

Human Rights Culture: Solidarity, Diversity and the Right to be Different

The concept of a human rights culture has been crucial to the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law. In this paper media and activist representations of human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender human rights are considered as indicative of an emerging human rights culture, especially around the Civil Partnerships Act 2004. A typology of representations of rights is developed and discussed. It is concluded that insofar as there is an emerging human rights culture, it is one that is concerned above all with creating and maintaining civic relationships rather than with the assertion of individual liberty, and as inviting political compromise rather than a principled stance on universal human rights.

The Cognitive Representation of Human Rights: Knowledge, Importance, and Commitment.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 2002) is an important ethical framework for political actions. In this declaration, and in the subsequent International Covenants (United Nations, 2002), 2 major classes of human rights are distinguished, one consisting of civil and political rights, and the other consisting of economic, social, and cultural rights. The Universal Declaration itself and the UN Decade for Human Rights Education emphasize the relevance of an adequate knowledge about human rights in the population. Accordingly, this article represents the results of 2 representative studies on human rights in Germany. The major results of these studies are that knowledge about human rights and about human rights documents is quite low. Also, economic, social, and cultural rights are less known, and are evaluated as less important, than civil and political rights. Thus, the idea of the indivisibility of human rights is not realized. Relating to the commitment to human rights, about 1% ...

Représentations sociales des droits de l'homme et des droits des peuples autochtones chez des membres de la nation montagnaise ou innu du Québec

This research studies the social representations of human rights and of Aboriginal rights among members of the Montagnais or Innu nation in three communities of Quebec. In these representations we have noted a distinction between the two families of rights in relation to their institutional definitions. However, as in scholarly thought, links between the two systems of rights are equally present in lay thinking. Also analyzed are beliefs about responsibility and efficacy of different authorities in having rights respected, as well as denunciation of discrimination and unfairness.

The emergence of a social representation of human rights via interpersonal communication: empirical evidence for the convergence of two theories

The emergence of a social representation of human rights via interpersonal communication: empirical evidence for the convergence of two theories

The emergence of a social representation of human rights via interpersonal communication: empirical evidence for the convergence of two theories

To test the common assumption that social representations originate in ordinary communication, ten 24-person groups of American college students exchanged messages for 2 1/2 weeks about six specific issues drawn from a 21-item questionnaire previously used by Clemence, Doise, & Lorenzi-Cioldi (1994) in a cross-cultural investigation on human rights. As expected, interpersonal communication led to increased spatial clustering (neighbors in social space became more similar) and enhanced correlations among these issues, leading to a more coherent factor structure of human rights conceptions. Clustering and correlation simultaneously illustrate the emergence of self-organization in social systems and are taken as evidence for the social origin of social representations. These findings show how Latane's Dynamic Social Impact Theory complements Moscovici's Social Representation Theory, providing a mechanism for understanding how and criteria for knowing when social representations arise from communication. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Representation of human rights across different national contexts: the role of democratic and non-democratic populations and governments

This research studied judgements and inferences on human rights across democratic and non-democratic national contexts. It is argued that when judging different countries, lay perceivers make use of representations of the country's inhabitants. Stereotypically democratic and non-democratic characteristics of national populations are employed as a basis of political judgements, especially in democratic contexts. In three studies the bases of representations of human rights' respect and violations are investigated. In the first study 76 subjects drew inferences on the human rights situation from formal descriptions of countries. These are either described with a type of government (democratic or authoritarian) or with national characteristics associated to the population (orderly and discussing or disorderly and clashing). In Study 2 (117 subjects), political and population information are crossed. In Study 3, 126 subjects evaluated the responsibility of the government and of the inhabitants in explaining the general situation in two positively and two negatively described national contexts. The results show the pervasive impact of population information on political judgements. Moreover members of non-democratic countries are viewed as accepting more human rights violations than members of democratic countries. This attitude inference is used by people to account for violations of human rights. Results are discussed in terms of common sense transformation of classical political theories which are grounded on universalism and essentialism. It is suggested that philosophical knowledge, much like scientific knowledge, is altered when penetrating common sense, thereby receiving specific social and ideological functions. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.