INT'L HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

This course will introduce students to the international law of human rights, and give a basic orientation to fundamental issues and controversies. The course has two principal focal points: first, the nuts and bolts of how international law functions in the field of human rights, and second, the value and limitations of legal approaches to a variety of human rights issues. Throughout the course, both theoretical and practical questions will be addressed, including who bears legal duties and who can assert legal claims, how these duties might be enforced, and accountability and remedy for violations. Attention will be given to how international law is made, what sorts of assumptions underlie various legal mechanisms, and how the law works in a variety of contexts.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Christian M de Vos
  Info
• 3 points

History of Human Rights

This course provides students with an introduction to the history of human rights as a compelling, contested, and dynamic constellation of discourses, structures, and practices.  As a framework for articulating and pursuing justice at local, national, and global levels, human rights in the 21st century draw on the diverse histories of social movements, moral philosophy, legal institutions, and political maneuvers across the modern period.  Claimed most frequently when their violation is most egregious, the history of human rights is also a history of wrongs, with the changing nature and scope of oppression serving to provoke different kinds of human rights struggles.  Often invoked as timeless and universal standards, the history of human rights demonstrates their basic malleability, both in terms of which rights are recognized and who qualifies as human, and their fundamental contingency, both in terms of the precariousness of any human rights ‘victory’ and their potential for co-optation in the interests of power.  Finally, while this course is primarily concerned with the history of human rights, we will also consider the human rights of history, reflecting on the role of history and historical consciousness in the pursuit for justice. 

Learning Outcomes

Aligned with the critical, historical, and integrative grounding of the course, the objectives for student learning encompass areas of
knowledge
,
skills
, and
values
.  They include:


Students will analyze the change over time of human rights discourses, institutions, practices.

Students will analyze the continuities and discontinuities between historic and contemporary forms of human rights.

Students will develop knowledge and understanding of various strategies for promoting human rights deployed by historic actors.

Students will develop knowledge and understanding of the role of history and historical consciousness in contemporary efforts to secure human rights.

Students will develop their capacity for empathy across difference.

Students will orient their own values in relation to the dynamic principles of human rights.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Glenn Mitoma
  Info
• 3 points

HUMAN RIGHTS SENIOR SEMINAR

HUMAN RIGHTS SEMINAR

The senior seminar is a capstone course required for the human rights major. The seminar provides students the opportunity to discuss human rights from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and to explore various theoretical approaches and research methodologies. Students undertake individual research projects while collectively examining human rights through directed readings and discussion.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Felisa Tibbitts
  Info
• 4 points

HUMAN RIGHTS THESIS SEMINAR

Prerequisites: HRTS UN3994 Human Rights Senior Seminar: Research Methods. Additional information available at: http://humanrightscolumbia.org/education/undergraduate This course is designed for human rights students who wish to write a honors-eligible thesis. The course will consist of group sessions, during which time students will present their work and participate in discussions, and individual meetings with the thesis supervisor. The course instructor is the thesis supervisor for each student.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Tracey Holland
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

Equality, Identity and Rights

EQUALITY, IDENTITY & RIGH

By connecting law, philosophy, and key human rights cases, this course will examine one of the main dilemmas in human rights theory and practice: the balance between equality and identity in the protection of rights. What forms of equality should be recognized to assure effective rights for all? What forms of identity should be recognized? Can there be effective human rights without an intersectional approach? Should we prioritize redistribution or recognition? What can we learn from cases developed in the UN System, in regional systems of human rights, and in specific countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe? How can we be effective human rights defenders in a growingly complex field? With these questions in mind, we will address different possibilities of protecting black women in the U.S. and Brazil, Muslim immigrants in Denmark, Indigenous women in Kenya and Canada, persons with disabilities in Tanzania, mothers with HIV in South Africa, poor workers in the Amazon Forest, abducted children in Argentina, and so forth.

Learning objectives: • Overview of how equality in human rights is connected to the recognition of identities, or more specifically, to the recognition of an intersectional approach to rights • Understanding different forms of equality that can be advanced through human rights • Adopting a problem-solving approach to an increasingly complex field of human rights, in order to become more effective human rights advocates • Critically analyzing and getting acquainted with cases in the UN system, the regional systems of human rights, and domestic jurisdictions around the world

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Daniela R Ikawa
  Info
• 3 points

SOCIAL MEDIA AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This course examines how changes in information and communications technology have, over the past two decades, fundamentally transformed the practices of civil society actors engaged with human rights issues. New communications tools such as Twitter, blogs, and Facebook have changed the ways that organizations communicate with their followers and seek to influence public debate. The increasing accessibility of analytic tools for researching and visualizing changing patterns of human rights abuse has empowered groups to better understand and respond more forcefully to these issues. Indeed, the use of social media as a communications tool has made it a data source for those monitoring and analyzing patterns of activity, in ways that draw increasingly on the techniques of big data analysis.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ted Perlmutter
  Info
• 3 points

Advocacy for Socio-Economic RIghts

Advocacy Socio-Economic R

This course will examine practical issues, opportunities, tactics and strategies to advocate for economic and social rights. The course will incorporate central debates about economic and social rights, such as how to identify violators and define state responsibility, whether these rights can be litigated, and how to make implementable recommendations for change, measure implementation and measure impact. The course will also look more in depth at the standards and fulfillment challenges on several of the key rights including health, housing, education, and labor.  

Throughout the course, you will focus on one economic and social rights topic of your choice. Through the lens of your chosen topic, you will review how organizations and social movements have engaged to affect change on similar issues, and use that research to explore many of the practical skills of advocacy and campaigning: framing recommendations and calls to action; drafting policy briefs; crafting media pitches and social media content; and designing and evaluating an overall advocacy strategy.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Mila H Rosenthal
  Info
• 3 points

Climate Justice

The unfolding climate emergency occurs at the confluence of three global systems of domination – capitalism, racialized imperialism, and patriarchy. Premised as they are on exploitation, competition, and inequality rather than consideration, cooperation and balance, these systems of domination not only have caused the crisis but are seemingly unable to resolve it. Among the injustices of the contemporary impasse is the likelihood the people who have least benefited from the global (dis)order, and especially minorities in the global south, will be the worst affected casualties of climate change.

Encompassing a focus on equity and frameworks for accountability and redress, the human rights paradigm is a useful lens through which to analyze the emergency, exert accountability, and imagine better futures. It is against this backdrop that this interdisciplinary (climate science, law, politics, social science, development studies and anthropology) course on Climate Justice has been introduced to the Human Rights Studies MA program.

This 3-credit course addresses contemporary issues in the evolving discourse and epistemology of climate justice. How should we understand the climate emergency from a social justice perspective? What terminologies, discourses and paradigms are useful? How have individuals, non-government organizations and social movements sought to overcome climate change vulnerabilities and advance climate justice? What litigation, law and policy initiatives have been brought, and with what level of success? And what alternative models of living, working and being are conceivable for a more socially, ecologically, and existentially sustainable world?

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Jacqueline Dugard
  Info
• 3 points

Beyond Human Rights Critique

Rising authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, grinding wars, mass involuntary migration, rampant misinformation and the unsettling possibilities of AI have made the world promised by the human rights project seem a distant or even fanciful prospect. Whatever faith we have in human rights to either secure or remake the world has had good reason to be shaken—or was unfounded from the start. Indeed, since universal rights were proposed there have been skeptics, questioning their abstraction, insufficiency, Eurocentrism, and overreach, among other shortcomings. When it comes to critiquing human rights, is there anything left to be said?

This seminar course considers where the human rights idea and project goes from here. Starting rather than ending with these critiques, we will pursue theoretical and practical attempts to reimagine human rights in their light. How have commentators drawn on liberal, pragmatic, radical democratic, and anticolonial thought to forge a vision of human rights made to the measure of a world in crisis? What are the value and limits of critique in the human rights project? And how do theory and praxis relate in attempts to reconstruct human rights beyond these critiques? In pursuit of answers, we will read political theory, history, philosophy, and ethnography, as well as together assemble an archive of already existing projects to reformulate, resignify, and mobilize human rights in novel directions.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Timothy Wyman-McCarthy
  Info
• 3 points

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES

The United States has a long complex relationship with the international human rights system. Although its founding was grounded in fundamental norms of inalienable rights, equality and freedom, U.S. history is characterized by divisive and sometimes violent disagreements about who counts as human, what is fundamental to the human condition, and which/how rights should be protected. How has this history contributed to our contemporary struggles? Through engaging with issues related to racial justice, criminal justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, gender justice, and indigenous people’s rights, students are asked to consider how certain rights are sites of contestation within the U.S. political system and within U.S. society.

This course offers a multidisciplinary survey of urgent contemporary human rights issues in the United States and seeks to advance students’ skills to examine human rights research and analysis through intersectional approaches. Part of the inquiry of this course is ensuring that students understand existing tensions among several key concepts (1) human rights as a body of international human rights law and institutions; (2) human rights movements using human rights discourse to further their aspirations; (3) constitutional rights in the U.S. as interpreted by U.S. courts that may or may not allude to/be contained in international law; and (4) political rhetoric that use the language of “rights” for political ends.

Coursework will ground current human rights debates in their social, legal, and political contexts. It will outline the different actors in the human rights landscape, focusing on mobilization strategies of human rights movements and the policy reforms that they seek to advance human rights agendas. Students will engage with legal cases and legislation in the United States. By the end of this course, you should expect to be able to:


Understand critical human rights issues in the United States, and apply international and domestic human rights principles and practice to these contemporary human rights debates;

Understand the role of social movements in shaping narratives around human rights;

Analyze (through case studies) the real-life application and effects of human rights policies, as well as how they contribute to the promotion, progressive enforcement, and internalization of international human rights.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Joy L Chia
  Info
• 3 points

HUMAN RIGHTS & URBAN PUB SPACE

The course will explore the often-contested terrain of urban contexts, looking at cities fron architectural, sociological, historical, and political positions. What do rights have to do with the city? Can the ancient idea of a right to the city tell us something fundamental about both rights and cities? Our notion of citizenship is based in the understanding of a city as a community, and yet today why do millions of people live in cities without citizenship? The course will be organized thematically in order to discuss such issues as the consequences of cities developments in relation to their peripheries beginning with the normative idea of urban boundaries deriving from fortifying walls, debates around the public sphere, nomadic architecture and urbanism, informal settlements such as slums and shantytowns, surveillance and control in urban centers, refugees and the places they live, catastrophes natural and man-made and reconstruction, and sovereign areas within cities the United Nations, War Crimes Tribunals. At the heart of our inquiry will be an investigation of the ways in which rights within urban contexts are either granted or withheld.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Noah B Chasin
  Info
• 3 points

INT'L HUMANITARIAN LAW/HUM RGTS

This seminar will cover various issues, debates, and concepts in the international law of armed conflict (known as international humanitarian law), particularly as it relates to the protection of non-combatants (civilians and prisoners of war). In doing so, we will examine how international humanitarian law and human rights law intersect. Both sets of legal norms are designed to protect the lives, well-being, and dignity of individuals.However, the condition of armed conflict provides a much wider set of options for governments and individuals to engage in violent, deadly action against others, including killing, forcibly detaining, and destroying the property of those designated as combatants. At the same time, the means of waging war are not unlimited, but rather are tightly regulated by both treaty and customary law. This course will examine how these regulations operate in theory and practice, focusing on the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Bruce L Cronin
  CULPA: 13 Info
• 4 points

Human Rights and Education

In this course, we will consider human rights as an educational enterprise, and education as a human rights practice. In addition to codifying the human right to education in Article 26, the Universal Declaration gives priority to “teaching and education” as a primary mechanism for ensuring respect, recognition, and observance of human rights. While human rights are more typically understood through legal and political discourse, this course focuses on education as both the site of and a strategy in struggles for just, equitable, and dignified communities.  This course examines both the right to education and the emergent field of human rights education, and provides students the opportunity to analyze human rights as a form of public pedagogy aimed at fostering particular kinds of subjects and communities. Using historical and contemporary examples, the course explores various educational strategies designed to promote human rights in different contexts and among different learners, and evaluates educational institutions as potential sites of human rights promotion and violation.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Glenn Mitoma
  Info
• 3 points

Borders, Surveillance, Rights

This interdisciplinary course grapples with the relationship between borders, surveillance, power and rights, critically examining the ways in which lines, boundaries, and caesuras are drawn among geographical entities, communities, identities, environments, and ultimately, social relations – demarcating self and other, establishing hierarchical relationships and activating infrastructures of violence. This seminar explores the dynamics, contradictions and politics surrounding borders and surveillance, and borrows from the fields of film, architecture, art and urban studies to explore the effect on access to and formulations of human rights. To this end, we engage notions of biopolitics, racialization, exclusion/exception, necropolitics, coloniality, hospitality and securitization, among others. The course also engages visual and spatial methodologies and maps out everyday practices of resistance that seek to challenge, subvert or collapse the multifaceted violence of borders.

Taken together, this course provides an alternative to conventional scholarship on this subject. It engages with and provides an alternative to the mainstream literature to take for granted the inclusive and integrative character of nation-states.
At first glance, the course may appear highly theoretical, but not to worry—we will move slowly through the texts and concepts together. The instructor will also ensure that we apply the ideas discussed in class to concrete and tangible case studies with examples given to enable easier access and collective learning.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Shourideh Molavi
  Info
• 3 points

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

This course introduces the fundamental concepts and problems of international human rights law. What are the origins of modern human rights law? What is the substance of this law, who is obligated by it, and how is it enforced? The course will cover the major international human rights treaties and mechanisms and consider some of todays most significant human rights issues and controversies. While the topics are necessarily law-related, the course will assume no prior exposure to legal studies.

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jacqueline Dugard
  Info
• Instructor: Belinda Cooper
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

HUMAN RIGHTS RESEARCH SEM

HUMAN RIGHTS GRAD RES SEMINAR

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Timothy Wyman-McCarthy
  Info
• Instructor: Shourideh Molavi
  Info
• 3 points

INTERNSHIP

HRSMA students may receive one academic credit for the completion of a relevant internship. The credit would count towards the elective requirement for the degree. In order to receive one credit, students will be required to complete a total of 100 internship hours. The internship must be professional in nature and substantively focused on human rights or social justice. For more information, students should refer to the HRSMA Digital Handbook.

• Instructor: Jacqueline Dugard
  Info
• 1 points