New Books in Human Rights

Amidst an atmosphere of hope on the Korean Peninsula over the past year, questions over the wellbeing of North Korea’s population have again come to global attention. But this is far from the first time that such a subject has been in the news, for ever since the catastrophic famine... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces.Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny explores the competing values and publics journalists must negotiate to provide objective news and to build trust. Exploring the complexities of ‘doing journalism’ in the 21st century with competing technological platforms he attempts to answer the question: what is the role of journalism and freedom of the press in the modern era?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the University of Dayton, explores this question through the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Rich with examples and detailed histories of the evolution of both human rights campaigns and celebrity and consumerist practices, the book challenges us to rethink contemporary political movements. Including critical discussions of Amnesty International, Save Darfur, Paris Hilton, Pussy Riot, and Live8, the book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how to change the world for the better, rather than just for the benefit of celebrity and consumer capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Remote Freedoms: Politics, Personhood and Human Rights in Aboriginal Central Australia (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah E. Holcombe, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, explores how universal human rights, codified 70 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, get translated, practiced, and challenged in the context of Indigenous rights. Through her field research with Anangu of Central Australia, she shows the paradoxical, double-edged nature of human rights for Aboriginal people and considers alternative ways of thinking about human dignity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia traced the evolution of the human rights revolution and argued that human rights as an ideology took the place of socialism and other utopian ideologies that failed. In his new book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2018), Moyn examines human rights from a different perspective, namely its inability to challenge the rise of inequality across the world. Moyn argues that this development wasn’t inevitable from a historical perspective and was the result of decisions made by politicians and social priorities articulated by philosophers beginning in the twentieth century. As a consequence, human rights has coexisted alongside inequality, unable to meaningfully critique it.Moyn begins by looking at the French Revolution, which he asserts was the first government that explicitly thought in egalitarian terms for its citizens. Noting that the welfare state was ironically a project of right-wing nationalist governments, Moyn argues that the postwar welfare states nevertheless embraced egalitarian impulses that not only established protections for their citizens but established ceilings on the kinds of wealth that that they could enjoy. In the Global South, newly independent states also embraced ideologies that would do the same. However, development economists instead emphasized poverty reduction campaigns that sought to provide marginal protections for the indigent without limiting the growth of wealth; this was matched by philosophers who reflected this same concern. The result was a human rights revolution focused more on subsistence and protections for the worst off that never tried to fight rising inequality.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Human rights as a concern in U.S. foreign policy and international politics has been well-documented, particularly in studies of the Carter Administration. However, how human rights emerged as an issue in U.S. domestic politics has received less attention, which is what Sarah Snyder’s From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018) studies and illuminates. Snyder’s research draws on both traditional diplomatic source material from the State Department, but also materials from NGOs and the papers of a number of congressmen who were involved in these issues. Using the framework of the “long 1960s,” Snyder lays bare some of the issues that sparked and sustained growing interest in human rights as a global issue, and the role that Americans ought to play in protecting human rights around the globe.Snyder points to a variety of factors that cultivated U.S. attention to human rights, particularly transnational connections between foreign and domestic actors, as well as the broader context of the 1960s in the United States, particularly the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. She draws on five case studies to lay bare these connections: the Soviet Union, Rhodesia, South Korea, Greece, and Chile. Some of the activism in these case studies was sustained by citizen groups and NGOs such as churches, while in other instances academics, officers within the State Department, or members of Congress directed much of the attention. Snyder then concludes by showing how Congress evolved in this period too, as hearings on human rights led to a number of important institutional changes in government.Snyder concludes by noting that while interest in human rights surged by 1976, attention has in many respects waned since the 1980s. Attention to these issues is not inevitable and it cannot be sustained without continuing participation from different sectors of civil society. Paying close attention to the ways that these interests were cultivated in the 1970s is one way that the activists of the 21st century might try cultivating awareness of the problems confronting the world today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Appeals to “press freedom” can be heard from across the political spectrum. But what those appeals mean varies dramatically. Sam Lebovic, in his excellent new book, Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Harvard University Press, 2016), traces the fraught history of that contested concept throughout the twentieth century. Beginning his analysis in the 1920s, Lebovic shows how conservative politicians, lawyers, and publishers began to define press freedom as freedom from state censorship, wrapped it in the first amendment, and fought New Deal attempts at regulation. Meanwhile, liberal politicians and journalists feared corporate control of the press as a threat to the democratic need for information, and advocated a freer and more trustworthy press. Not interested solely in the debates over press freedom, Lebovic also focuses on, what he calls, “the everyday politics of information.” He reveals how state classification practices and the political economy of the news fundamentally shaped how information flowed. It is an ambitious book that succeeds in telling a crucial story and it should inform contemporary approaches to press monopolization and the ever-growing “classified universe.” The book will interest intellectual historians, communications scholars, legal historians, political historians, and historians of U.S. foreign relations.Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Aimi Hamraie takes a “sledgehammer to history” in the spirit of one guerrilla activist group that they track in the archives—among many other people, objects, and historical contexts. Hamraie focuses on work around “access-knowledge”—that is, the forms of expertise that were considered legitimate ways of knowing and responding to disability through design. What has counted as legitimate access-knowledge, Hamraie argues, indicates designers’ goals: Was the aim of design to make productive workers, liberal consumers, or structures that materialized a commitment to spacial belonging? Who were the imagined users and how could new political priorities materialize in worlds already built? Answers to these questions made—and continue to remake—our material world and its frictions. Hamraie brings their training in feminist epistemology to never-before-accessed archival materials, along with an array of historical images and documents. The result is a persuasive, beautiful, and intrepidly researched book. Building Access torques received wisdom in disability studies, history of science, and architectural design, and models how to attend to research, writing, and publishing as a material practice.Hamraie is Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, and Director of Vanderbilt’s Critical Design Lab.This interview was a collective effort among Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students in the course New Approaches to STS. For more information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. In Raza Si, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Jimmy Patino narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence.By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patino fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patio tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an abolitionist position on immigration–going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.Jimmy Patino is Assistant Professor of Chicano and Latino studies at the University of Minnesota. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies.Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, out in paperback May 2018).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and whether it will continue to provide the voting rights protections it has in the past.In Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act (Stanford University Press, 2017), Jesse Rhodes, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, places the VRA into a political context. He aims to figure out the political puzzle of the VRA: Why, for fifty years, have both Democrats and Republicans in Congress consistently voted to expand the protections offered by the VRA, yet the act remains vulnerable? Why have Republicans consistently adopted administrative and judicial decisions that undermine legislation they repeatedly back?Rhodes argues that conservatives have pursued a paradoxical strategy which takes advantage of high and low salience. The conservative strategy, according to Rhodes, is to accept expansive voting rights protections in highly visible votes in Congress while simultaneously narrowing the scope of federal enforcement in low visibility administrative and judicial maneuvers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices