Human Rights and Rights-Related Courses In Spring 2008

Please write to rights@duke.edu if you want to include future classes in this listing.

• AAS 171/POLSCI 171

  Apartheid and Democracy in South Africa
  Days & Time: Tu, Th 1:15 – 2:30; Physics 130
  Instructor: Sheridan W. Johns III

  Apartheid is 'dead.' Nelson Mandela was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki in 1999 as president of South Africa. Mandela's and Mbeki's political party, the African National Congress (ANC), remains the governing party. Yet the legacies of apartheid are still deeply rooted and the present ANC government still faces Herculean challenges to overcome them. To understand and assess the efforts of the ANC governments to deal with South Africa's apartheid past and create a 'new South Africa', it is necessary to know how the apartheid system was created by the National Party (NP) and how apartheid was resisted. This course will initially examine apartheid ideology and how the NP government, elected in 1948 and holding power until 1994, used its ideology to build upon the legacy of segregation that it inherited even more rigid structures of political, economic, and social inequality within South Africa, buttressed by increasingly brutal mechanisms of control and repression. Equally close attention will be given to the emergence and changing nature of anti-apartheid opposition. How did the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s, the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, the emergence of new trade union militancy in the 1970s, and the Soweto uprising of 1976, lead to the broadening mass movement of the 1980s that successfully challenged the NP government and its attempt 'to adapt or die'? What developments created the situation in which President DeKlerk of the NP, elected in 1989, released Nelson Mandela from prison, unbanned the ANC, and undertook negotiations with it? The course will then turn to analysis of the 1990-1994 negotiations; the new South African constitution; the elections of 1994, 1999, and 2004 which the ANC won, and the policies of the ANC governments. It will conclude with consideration of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and prospects for democracy in the 21st century. Videos will be shown through the course to make vivid the nature of the apartheid system and how those within it challenged it.

  

• EN 186A/FVD 108/PUBPOL 172/LIT 120C/POLSCI 156

  Conflict, Resolution and Film
  Days & Time: W, 6:00 – 9:00; Bell Tower media room
  Instructor: Kathleen Wallace

  This course examines the relationship between film, conflict, and resolution of conflict. Through interdisciplinary studies of scholarly research, practice, and film, students explore various ways that film can be used to transform people's awareness and understanding of conflict and facilitate dialogue and resolution. The course covers a broad spectrum of domestic and global conflicts and varied models for resolution.

  The course involves in depth study of conflict resolution and film, the intersection of the two, and specifically, how film can enhance communication between parties to a conflict. While no prior video experience is necessary, students should have access to a video camera and will be expected to make short videos throughout the semester.

  CONFLICT, CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND FILM is encouraged for students interested in a variety of disciplines where conflict is prevalent including law, political science, public policy, communication, business, leadership, human rights, and human relations.

  

• DOCST 193S/PUBPOL 168S

  Documentary Engagement
  Days & Time: M, 1:15 – 3:45; Smith WRHS 228
  Instructor: Alex Harris

  Documentary photography as a tool for social engagement in preparation for intensive field-based projects. Students study documentary photographers while planning and refining their own documentary projects through which they will address societal issues locally, nationally, or abroad. Students learn and refine valuable technical skills such as Photoshop, inkjet printing, and web-based methods in order to complete a preliminary documentary project by the end of the semester. Service learning course. Consent of instructor required.

  

• LIT 162ZS.03/CA 180S/ROMST 150S/AAS 199S/WOMENST 150S

  Ethical Inquiry, Cross-Cultural Understanding, Civilizations:
  MAN, HU-MAN RIGHTS AND THE HU-MAN-ITIES
  Days & Time: Tu, 4:25 – 6:55
  Instructor: Walter D. Mignolo

  At the age of genomics and bio-technology it is worth to examine current ideas about Man (as in Hu-man), Being, Human Rights and the Humanities as a sphere of knowledge in higher education. Runa, in Quechua, cannot be translated into the Renaissance concept of Man. Inca and Roman Civilizations had different principles and structure of knowledge. The idea of Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Human Rights, had its antecedent in the concept of Rights of the Nations (Ius Gentium). Paradoxically, Rights of the Nations, Bills of Rights, Rights of Man originated in Western discourses that had eclipsed concepts such as Runa in Quechua, and similar concepts in non-European languages, not derived from Latin.

  This seminar takes its lead and its organization from Afro-Caribbean intellectuals, scholar and activist, Sylvia Wynter. Wynter's ground-breaking works on "after Man, toward the Human". We will complement Wynter's work with European philosophers such as Husserl, Sartre-and Merleau Ponty on concepts of experience and humanism; political philosophers as German Jew Hannah Arendt and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben; and Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as CLR James, Padget Henry and Lewis Gordon. Core concepts in the seminar will be, coloniality and decoloniality of Being and coloniality and decolonialty of knowledge. We will also address the rhetoric of reports such as the Council on Bioethics, and their conception of "Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness".

  The seminar fulfills the requirement of cross-cultural understanding in its questioning of the uni-versality of the idea of Man, Human, Human Being and Humanity. It fulfills the requirement of ethical inquiries in its questioning of the very act of generating knowledge, the institutional and bio-graphic politics of knowledge (e.g., who is a position to generate knowledge, what are the rationals and what are the consequences)? What are the interconnections between racism (and therefore, the concept of Human) and epistemology (and therefore the concept of Humanities? And what are the interconnections between development (developed and underdeveloped countries), and epistemology (institutions of higher education, language of the country and language of scholarship in developed countries; laboratories and technology?, etc). The seminar focuses on the interconnections between racism, knowledge and economy and explores the ethical dimension of education.

  

• CA 162S/DOCST 162S/AAS 195S

  Farmworkers in NC: Poverty
  Days & Time: M, W 10:05 – 11:20; Bridges 201
  Instructor: Charles D. Thompson

  In this seminar we focus on those who bring food to our tables, particularly from the fields of North Carolina. We trace farm work from the plantation system to sharecropping, connecting agricultural history with the migrant and seasonal farmworker population today. We will also study issues of both national and local importance at present, particularly the issue of immigration of Latinos to North Carolina.

  For the documentary studies/ service project part of the grade, students are required to visit a North Carolina farm community and conduct a documentary project related to farmworkers. One group may work on a documentary film about Guatemalan workers in Florida. Another group in the class may document activists working on the "Dream Act," a bill in Congress that would make it possible for the children of migrant workers to attend universities for in-state tuition. Yet another group may work on the issue of H2A guestworkers as outlined in the immigration bills proposed at present.

  Related to this course, students may opt to take a special spring break trip to the Arizona-Mexico border to study the issues of immigration, farm work, and the challenges of bi-culturalism we find in the borderlands/la frontera.

  

• PHIL 195/GLHLTH 180

  Global Health Ethics
  Days & Time: Th 2:50 – 5:20; Trent 040
  Instructors: Monica Hlavac, Allen Buchanan

  This course takes global health seriously as an important moral issue. We will start out with views on the moral significance of health disparities and the different moral considerations that support the claim that there are ought to be socially protected health care. Next we will discuss different approaches to assigning responsibility for access to health care, keeping in mind that this might necessitate the creation of new institutions. Finally, we will explore the issue of essential medicines in less developed countries and various proposals to ensure that new drugs are developed and existing drugs are made affordable and accessible.

  

• CA 180S/GLHLTH 180S

  Global Health/Human Rights/Ethics
  Days & Time: M, W 2:50 – 4:05; Science 216
  Instructor: Jason Cross
  *Approved for Global Health Certificate ethics requirement
  **Service-Learning Course

  Global health and Human Rights are powerful approaches for advancing justice and human wellbeing. They also often set the terms of engagement in relationships of unequal power, and between different ways of knowing about the world and its problems. What human experiences and relationships do these languages of activism make visible and what do they hide? How do they inspire and enable certain forms of social change, and perhaps marginalize others? How and when do the global health and human rights systems support each other or come into tension? This class will examine these questions by looking at the institutions, practices and professional cultures of global health and human rights promotion, with an emphasis on instances where the two overlap. Particular attention will be paid to healthcare and political frameworks that consider health a human right.

  Through case studies, exercises, and service-learning assignments, students will examine the ethics of collaborating with multiple stakeholders in activism, policy and programming. Throughout the course, we will consider ethical dimensions of developing and applying humanitarian expertise within relationships of unequal power. We will also consider ethical aspects of working across communities with different forms of knowledge about social problems.

  The class aims to develop student abilities to combine professional skills and strategy with cultural critique. As scholars, this approach can help students assess human rights and global health systems as both flexible and situated practices. As activists and policy-thinkers, it can help students better grasp the advantages, limitations and "dark sides" of global health and human rights approaches, and thus be more nimble and savvy strategists and program developers, as well as more responsible and accountable wielders of power.

  The course combines frameworks and case-studies from many fields, including law, political science, public health, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, economics and public policy. We also examine professional reports and documents from global health, human rights, and development organizations.

  

• EN 381

  Human Being After Genocide
  Days & Time: M 1:15 – 3:45; Trent 039
  Instructor: Priscilla Wald

  This course will focus historically on the period following the Second World War when the world had to come to terms with the use of modern technologies for the unprecedented destruction of human populations. In the wake of destruction came the question "whither humanity?" Accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima celebrated victory but cautioned that "we" had "sowed the whirlwind" and wondered, "in the name of humanity, where are we marching?" The questions were asked with new urgency as the details of Hitler's Final Solution reached an ever-broadening public. New technologies had magnified the destructive potential of humankind. Following the war, new political and geographical realignments further exacerbated the sense of disequilibrium. Writing in the late 1960s, Harold Isaacs described the seismic shifts of a new world order in which "some 70 new states carved out of the old empires since 1945 are made up of nonwhite peoples newly out from under the political, economic and psychological domination of white rulers" and of people "stumbling blindly around trying to discern the new images, the new shapes and perspectives these changes have brought, to adjust to the painful rearrangement of identities and relationships which the new circumstances compel." If politics raised these questions of belonging on a macro scale, improved visual technologies offered new insight into the microscopic stuff of human being that generated questions of its own.

  In this course, we will consider a broad range of work, across genres, media, and cultures, that emerged from the effort to make sense of what had allowed human beings to perpetrate--or, more disturbingly, to allow the perpetration of--such atrocities, and the attempt to imagine the new world order. We will explore the connection between the concept of "human rights," through which writers sought to articulate terms they hoped would make such atrocities unthinkable in the future, and the changing idea of "human being" as it emerged through scientific research especially in fields renovated (or generated) by the war, such as genetics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis and behaviorism. In so doing, we will explore the genealogy of the concept of "biopolitics." Readings may be drawn from the work of such writers as Arendt, Levi, Adorno, Fanon, Foucault, Ngugi and Agamben as well as from works of literature and popular culture (with a particular focus on science fiction novels and films). The course will include discussions not only of the topic, but also of method and approach: how we understand categories such as "theory," "literature," "popular culture," and how we might approach them in scholarship and in the classroom.

  

• CA 161S/POLSCI 124S

  Human Rights Activism
  Days & Time: Tu, Th 1:15 – 2:30; Science 204
  Instructor: Robin Kirk

  Students will begin with the basic texts that human rights activists use to ground and coordinate their efforts to promote human rights. We will examine the histories and contexts of these documents, and how early proponents of human rights used them, successfully and unsuccessfully. Continuing the focus on how activists made practical use of the law, politics, the media, events and public opinion, we will look at examples from a variety of periods, disciplines and cultures. In the first half of the course, we will focus on case examples drawn from the formation of the modern human rights movement, including Europe's attitude toward Latin America's indigenous populations, the British-based campaign to end slavery, the impact on human rights of the Holocaust, the death penalty, the development of human rights in the context of the American civil rights movement and the effect on human rights of the Cold War and its end. During the second half of the course, we will examine contemporary and future human rights issues, including women's rights, the challenges facing refugees and the internally displaced, applying human rights law to new weapons and technology, the laws of war in a changing world, humanitarian interventions, truth commissions and human welfare issues, among other things. Most weeks, we will spend some time discussing a "person of the week," an individual who has worked on or is working on human rights issues. In this way, we will explore how histories, theories and the tools available to activists have been or are being put into play to further human rights protection. These individuals may be lawyers, writers, poets or ne'er-do-wells, yet they are joined by a passion to ensure that the rights of their fellow humans are respected. We also have several guests who will be visiting class and three outside events that students are required to attend. There is a service-learning component to the class.

  

• PUBPOL 388

  Indigenous Peoples: Human Rights
  Days & Time: Th 4:25 – 6:55; Rubenstein 149
  Instructor: Rosemary Fernholtz

  This seminar focuses on indigenous peoples, their basic rights, and their roles in national and international development processes. Through class discussions, case studies and role-playing, students will examine the impact of national policies and global trends on indigenous populations and vice versa, and the dynamics of conflict generation and resolution. Among the issues to be discussed are notions of sovereignty and governance, land and other property rights, community management of natural resources, indigenous social movements, international networks and assistance, culture, access and survival. This seminar is designed for graduate students from diverse fields such as public policy, environmental science, law, religion, education and business, who are concerned with international development issues and processes. Fellows enrolled in the course are expected to participate actively in class sessions and to read the course materials. We will have class discussions of theories relevant to power and participation, case studies, and role playing. Fellows will be required to submit short individual policy papers and one major group paper, which will also be presented in class.

  

• CA 80FCS/PUBPOL 80FCS

  International Law and Global Health
  Days & Time: Tu, Th 11:40 – 12:55; Rubenstein 149
  Instructor: Catherine Admay

  This course will examine where and how international law intersects with global health inequalities. In what instances has international law been a positive force for addressing these inequalities and when has the law itself perhaps compounded and extended the problem? How well does international law in general and human rights law in particular grapple with the ethical questions that arise in global health practice? Do international lawyers, policymakers and policy advocates foreground the ethical stakes? The cultural context? Why and why not? Through 2-3 case studies, students will be challenged to critically assess whether the law-and what bodies of law-would be the most appropriate to addressing complex issues related to health inequalities.

  So for example, if the families of working coffee farmers in the Sidamo region of Ethiopia are suffering from severe malnutrition while western coffee consumers pay top dollar for a bag of roasted Sidamo label beans, what legal regimes might apply? Or if American pharmaceutical companies institute legal proceedings in South Africa or India whose outcome might put essential medicines beyond sick poor people's reach, in what other arenas might lawyers work to contest or address the health inequalities that will follow? Having a basic grasp of a handful of leading rules systems (human rights, trade, intellectual property, among others) that might apply, students will be asked to explore the legal, political and ethical merits of pursuing better health outcomes through resort to the law. We will consider the law as lawyers must-attending to the technical elements and complexities-but we will also seek to understand the extent to which the law's power resides as much in its political punch or moral appeal. In short, the course will work to situate international law and global health in the stream of strategic choices available to those who call for better health by demanding greater justice.