Translating Human Rights

In a world where political vocabularies are increasingly losing shared meaning, this seminar examines the global circulation of human rights through the lens of the concept of translation. Rather than treating human rights as a single stable or universal language, the course asks how the meanings of human rights are produced, transformed, and contextualized as they are invoked across different institutional, cultural, and historical settings. Beginning with key conceptual works that illuminate the power relations and asymmetries embedded in the process of translation, we will then engage with ethnographic and historical studies that trace how human rights are understood, negotiated, and practiced across diverse locales and times. These empirically grounded readings reveal the wide range of (un)expected political consequences that accompany these processes as human rights are translated across contexts, including the expansion of bureaucratic and legal institutions, the emergence of new forms of violence and silencing, and the possibilities and limits of sociopolitical transformations.