After a week long extravaganza of performance and politics around music and dance, it is time for performance & politics of an entirely different kind: that of human rights. Faithful to our by-now established practice, also this week’s posts examine this theme from multiple different angles, including human rights activism, conceptual change as well as underlying structures of the global aid industry.
We begin with Jennifer Curtis who discusses LGBT activism in Ireland – and more specifically, the enormous change that this issue has faced within the Irish human rights scene. This post reflects the swift manner in which the status of the LGBT(I) issue has changed also more generally under the international human rights framework over the past decade and some.
We then continue with another post discussing the limits – the ends? – of human rights via the post of Ukri Soirila. He discusses how increasingly the human rights discourse is linked in the rhetoric of international law and international collaboration to Human Dignity. Yet, as he concludes, although this shift may spontaneously appear as capable of strengthening the legitimacy of the contemporary human rights regime and regulatory framework by solidifying their underlying basis, in fact this promise is an empty one and talk on human dignity comes forth as ‘empty glory’ which contributes to the sustenance of power.
We then feature another one of our recent thematic lists on Human Rights. However this time the list is a teaser only and we’ll issue a call for reviews later. What can we say: our previous lists have proven so popular that we have a full avalanche of reviews forthcoming… Time to get some of them out before getting more in!
Uncharacteristially, we conclude this week with – not one – but two posts.
The first of them is a particular Allegra favorite, namely the campaign called Rusty Radiators responsible for enormously popular videos parodying ‘standard’ aid campaign ads. We chat with some of the wizards to see just how this campaign came about, and how they see the future of international collaboration and aid.
Running From the Storm, by DeviantART user BigA-nt.
Finally, we find urgency in returning to the dire conditions within the academia via a post by Mariya Ivancheva, which emanated out of some heated exchanges taking place last week at the email-list anthropologymatters.com. Casual Researchers – is this a new low & should we start to retort to the human rights discourse also to make our plight more visible?!
We accompany all this with more ‘Jewels of Allie’s Archives‘ in our social media interactions to remind us of what we have discussed under the human rights banner previously. Thanks for joining our ride once again & we hope that you’ll enjoy it!
