AP/HREQ 1010 6.00
Introduction to Human Rights and Equity Studies
This course introduces the field of critical human rights and equity studies. It provides an understanding of traditional liberal human rights discourses, covering such concepts as natural rights, moral rights, socio-political, religious and legal conceptions of rights. The second term examines debates within contemporary critical human rights, informed by an interdisciplinary equity and social justice framework. The course covers the origins and history of human rights and equity, examining such concepts as natural rights, religious and legal conceptions of rights, and debates over competing and complementary rights.
Further, this course confronts contradictions inherent in liberal democratic (capitalist) states especially in the official treatment of “rights” and concomitant issues of fundamental equality, equity, and social justice. This course seeks to provide a critical reading of human rights as sites of inquiry within comparative and historical contexts of political economy, cultural reproductions, and prevailing hegemonic state practices. We will interrogate accommodative and challenging discourses that discipline the constitution and contributions of extant human rights practices and policies. Major trajectories in the study of rights will be investigated in reference to the prospects and challenges of differing perspectives ranging from the more normative traditions to an appreciation of “praxis”. Law as a set of texts, narratives of inequality and morality are further contrasted with the demands of equity. This course is designed to examine the contributions of critical thought to the analysis of rights, struggles in different contemporary contexts of power and the limitations of mainstream paradigms in grasping current processes of equity.
Course credit exclusion: AP/HREQ 2010 6.00 Introduction to Human Rights and Equity Studies.