Fall 2025

This course is part of a 2-part sequence and satisfies a civilizations sequence requirement. If not used to satisfy that requirement, the course may be used to satisfy Human Rights Major Requirements as an elective in any stream.

This workshop is for Human Rights Majors who are either writing a BA Thesis or doing a Capstone Project. It is informally scheduled and meets roughly every other week in Autumn and Winter Quarters. Participants will receive training in scholarly and other skill sets needed to complete their projects; they will workshop their theses and projects with one another and their praeceptor, receiving critical feedback; and they will collectively problem solve.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between "the real" and "fiction," will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular-research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing.

The rights of persons with disabilities have become a new frontier of human rights across the world. This course introduces recent developments in concepts, tools, and practices of disability rights both internationally and in different regions/countries. We will pay specific attention to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including its principles, provisions on key topics (e.g., institutionalization, education, employment, and political participation), and the role of state and non-state actors in its implementation.

This course will introduce students to the legal architecture of international human rights law. Whilst the legal framing of rights emphasizes universality and the common good, its application reflects the historical compromises and political uncertainties of the times. This course will explore the tensions that are produced when politics meets 'the law' and examine the issues, actors, doctrines and practices that make up the human rights project.

This course will introduce students to the field of human rights through two specific lenses. First, the course will emphasize human rights practices, demonstrating how human rights-in-action relates to and diverges from the ideals and discourses of human rights as laid out in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, the course will view human rights from the perspective of affected communities, centering the experiences and critiques of those on the front lines of human rights crises.

This interdisciplinary course explores aesthetics, environmental racism, and a human rights approach to the Commons to inform our perspective on the politics and aesthetics of water from the local to the global. The course will look at issues of scarcity and abundance through the lenses of art and human rights. The course will incorporate work by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who will visit the class.

How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective.