Convenor
Coeli Barry
Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Mahidol University
Abstract
M. Anne Brown (in her book: Human Rights at the Borders of Suffering) writes that the “question of human rights…addresses questions about power and participation, respect and the ways we construct boundaries of exclusion and inclusion… The facts that the terms of such questions are not themselves clear and give rise to further questions, and that…the answers may not be fixed, but shifting and partial, do not undermine their potency.”
Brown’s description of ‘the question of human rights’ is both welcome and relevant, especially for people working in the Global South. Human rights is not a fixed set of ideas and this fact allows for and encourages diverse approaches to researching, writing, conceptualizing and teaching about rights. The on-going struggles for rights and the evolving interpretations of rights rely on new readings of history as well as critical readings of cultural lexicons.
The panel organizers proceed from the assumption that human rights in the Global South, while being embedded in epistemologies, in legal frameworks and in the repertoires of activists in these societies, is a concept that is still open to contestation. Drawing on the work of Sally Merry, particularly on the variety of ways that rights ideas and laws are vernacularized in different settings and among different groups in society, the panel hopes to include papers that explore how research strategies, rights activism (advocacy) and pedagogies employed in the teaching of human rights embrace this lack of fixedness. We welcome research that draws on anthropological method and furthers reflection on the limits and possibilities for anthropologies of rights.