Author: José Julián López Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319742744 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 476
Book Description
In this book, López proposes the ‘political imaginary’ model as a tool to better understand what human rights are in practice, and what they might, or might not, be able to achieve. Human rights are conceptualised as assemblages of relatively stable, but not unchanging, historically situated, and socially embedded practices. Drawing on an emerging iconoclastic historiography of human rights, the author provides a sympathetic yet critical overview of the field of the sociology of human rights. The book addresses debates regarding sociology’s relationships to human rights, the strengths and limits of the notion of practice, human rights’ affinity to postnational citizenship and cosmopolitism, and human rights’ curious, yet fateful, entanglement with the law. Human Rights as Political Imaginary will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, international relations and criminology.
Author: Chiara Bottici Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231527810 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.
Author: Crystal Parikh Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452954674 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 427
Book Description
The legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights are usually understood and applied in a global context with little bearing on the legal discourse, domestic political struggles, or social justice concerns within the United States. In Writing Human Rights, Crystal Parikh uses the international human rights regime to read works by contemporary American writers of color—Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, Ana Castillo, Aimee Phan, and others—to explore the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political communities emerge. Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Pairing the ethical deliberations in such works as Beloved and A Gesture Life with human rights texts like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, she considers why principles articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties—such as the right to self-determination or the right to family—are too often disregarded at home. Human rights concepts instead provide writers of color with a deeply meaningful method for political and moral imagining in their literature. Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century. In the absence of domestic human rights enforcement, these literatures provide a considerable repository for those ways of life and subjects of rights made otherwise impossible in the present antidemocratic moment.
Author: Leticia Sabsay Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137263873 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
This book develops a performative and relational approach to gendered and sexualised bodies conceived as distinct from the more limited individualistic idea of sexual identity and orientation that is at play within notions of progress in contemporary transnational sexual politics. Focusing on the psychosocial dimension of sexual life, Sabsay challenges accepted ideas of increased emancipation, and the steady extension of rights, offering instead a critique of the liberal imaginary that is at the base of the sexual rights-bearing subject. The book offers a notion of sexual embodiment that provides an alternative to individualism, one that is social, radically relational and psychically divided, and that implies a different conception of democratic sexual politics for our time.This book brings together political and cultural analysis of sexual rights discourse with a strong theory of the relational subject whose political investments and articulations depend on a political imaginary. This is a highly original and methodical text which will be of particular interest to academics and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, politics and psychology.
Author: Craig Browne Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1003823165 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.
Author: Helen J. Delfeld Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134588933 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 134
Book Description
The book investigates the beliefs about governance that determine that state structures are the most appropriate venue for international human rights actors and activists to operate. Helen Delfeld argues that those beliefs rely on a normative perception of a nation-state, not necessarily applicable to most of the post-colonial world. While most post-colonial states may appear to demonstrate the trappings of modern nation-statehood, these projects are mostly spurred by and benefit an elite class. At the same time, there may be little identification with their government among the grassroots polity. Delfeld focuses on the Philippines as an example of a post-colonial state, using nested case studies to show how people think differently about the state at different scales. Following a two-pronged approach, she investigates key moments of state action or inaction, and then asks people at the grassroots about their perspectives on governance, their engagement with the state, and their views of human rights. Her findings indicate that people at the grassroots rely on alternative forms of governance, often in the form of NGOs, INGOs, local cooperatives, informal networks, or structures that pre-date both colonization and independence. Her research also indicates the possibility that some of the most effective human rights actors do not rely on the state, as demonstrated by comparing locally-generated campaigns aimed at promoting environmental rights with state campaigns that address violence against women. The Hollow State and Human Rights shows that rights initiatives misdirected through a "hollow state" might strengthen the mechanisms of the state, but might not actually create a more attentive nation-state. Human rights activists and actors may be far more effective by accessing local structures directly, the practical implications of which go beyond the Philippines to other post-colonial states.
Author: Christian Karner Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing ISBN: 1839101571 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
This Research Handbook takes stock of the state of the art in sociological research on globalization and the contributors outline future trajectories for this, one of the most pressing and challenging sociological themes of our time.
Author: Morwenna Griffiths Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1118944720 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Re-Imagining Relationships in Education re-imagines relationships in contemporary education by bringing state-of-the-art theoretical and philosophical insights to bear on current teaching practices. Introduces theories based on various philosophical approaches into the realm of student teacher relationships Opens up innovative ways to think about teaching and new kinds of questions that can be raised Features a broad range of philosophical approaches that include Arendt, Beckett, Irigaray and Wollstonecraft to name but a few Includes contributors from Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S.
Author: Kathryn McNeilly Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134990669 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
Against the recent backdrop of sociopolitical crisis, radical thinking and activism to challenge the oppressive operation of power has increased. Such thinkers and activists have aimed for radical social transformation in the sense of challenging dominant ways of viewing the world, including the neoliberal illusion of improving the welfare of all while advancing the interests of only some. However, a question mark has remained over the utility of human rights in this activity and the capability of rights to challenge, as opposed to reinforce, discourses such as liberalism, capitalism, internationalism and statism. It is at this point that the present work aims to intervene. Drawing upon critical legal theory, radical democratic thinking and feminist perspectives, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation seeks to reassess the radical possibilities for human rights and explore how rights may be re-engaged as a tool to facilitate radical social change via the concept of ‘human rights to come’. This idea proposes a reconceptualisation of human rights in theory and practice which foregrounds human rights as inherently futural and capable of sustaining a critical relation to power and alterity in radical politics.
Author: Samuel Moyn Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674256522 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 346
Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Author: José Julián López
Author: Chiara Bottici
Author: Crystal Parikh
Author: Leticia Sabsay
Author: Craig Browne
Author: Helen J. Delfeld
Author: Christian Karner
Author: Morwenna Griffiths
Author: Kathryn McNeilly
Author: Samuel Moyn