OSUN Theme: Human Rights
Looking at Human Rights: Methods of Observation and Description
Term: September 5, 2023 – December 21, 2023Level: 200-Level
Day/Time: T/Th 10:10 AM EDT - 11:30 AM EDT
In human rights, the observation and description of reality is a fundamental and daunting problem. This reading and writing seminar explores different methods for the observation and description of complex historical and cultural situations, focusing on the violence and injustice that human rights reporting seeks to expose and challenge. Documenting them has so far stayed within the boundaries of institutional legal language and denunciation. We set out to re-appropriate reality, to get at perception before it has been shaped as expression, to read images and words in the heart and eye before they harden as categories, styles, definitions – always trying, to reconcile the layers of meanings and to pull from all these contradictions some organized process where the documentary act begins and gives us a deeper understanding of the human rights problematic We will try, through examples and assignments, to investigate how non-professionals can use not only current technologies but also new attitudes so that human rights reporting can escape its own dreary ghetto and become as deep and as urgent as it ought to be. We will be reading and seeing writers and photographers including Hannah Arendt, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Friedrich Engels, Shoshana Felman, Frantz Fanon, Susan Sontag, and many more.
Credits: 4 U.S. / 8 ECTS