Course Descriptions for the 2008 International Human Rights Exchange, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Core Course, Human Rights:  Perspectives from the Disciplines

This course aims to introduce students to significant materials on human rights (drawing upon the South African experience among others) and to different perspectives on the idea of human rights and through that study to the idea of differing disciplinary perspectives.  The course is taught in six or seven two-week segments with each segment presenting human rights material from a particular disciplinary perspective.  While the precise content and mixture of disciplines will shift from year to year, the course will cover topics with the variety and depth of the following: an analysis of the legality of Nelson Mandela's speech at the Rivonia trial from a law perspective, an investigation of the idea of universality of human rights from a philosophy perspective, the costs of differing implementation strategies for transformation initiatives from an economics perspective, the aesthetics of iconic images of struggle from an arts perspective, the balance of domestic and international causes of the South African transformation from a history perspective, the place of human rights within the UN system from an international relations perspective, the impact on women's lives of human rights from a politics perspective, the success or failure of state strategies to implement socioeconomic rights from a sociology perspective, and the deployment of rhetorics of victimization and rights from a psychology perspective. The draft course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

Core Seminar, Engagement in Human Rights

This course examines the varied practices of human rights advocacy and engagement.  Students will examine the differences and tensions between governmental and non-governmental organizations, between activist and community-based groups, and between national and international agents of change; the third sector or ‘civil society’ and the advocacy roles can it play; the dilemmas of ethical or political principles put to the test of engagement; and other pressing issues.  Class discussions will be devoted to literature addressing themes common to many practical applications of human rights advocacy; student presentations that unite theoretical studies with practical applications; and individual capstone projects, typically a piece of writing.  For approximately ten hours per week, students will engage in academically enriching practical work at a human rights organization, typically a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the Johannesburg area. Students will keep weekly journals on their experiences outside the classroom.   Final marks/grades will be based on class attendance and participation, a mid-term student presentation, and a final project. The course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

Elective Courses 2008

IHRE electives last for half the semester and are divided between the Wits 3rd and 4th Blocks, each six-seven weeks in length. Each elective is worth two credits and meets for three lectures plus one tutorial each week. Students will take two electives per block. Below is the preliminary list of electives that will be offered in the 2008 program.

Third Wits Block (July – August)

Development, Welfare Economics, and Human Rights

The course will cover emerging trends in inequalities of growth and development levels between countries as well as individuals. It will cover areas of development and welfare economics in the broader context of human rights. The development economics component will critically assess theories of economic and human development and key issues like poverty, inequality, income divergence, and gender. It will also deal with the various measurements of development and of well-being as well as their limitations. The welfare economics component will discuss the neoclassical and new welfare economics approaches and will discuss concepts such as externalities and the conditions for social welfare maximization. The course will also require students to explore and debate the concept of and issues pertaining to sustainable development.

Human Rights and African Literature

The course will explore traditional African understandings of human rights as they are expressed in literature in the broad sense of a people's narratives.  The course seeks to glean and highlight indigenous precepts of fairness and justice from proverbs, legends, myths, poems, tales, and novels. It will present these ideas as part of a larger socio-cultural system of a given African people (e.g., the Ashanti, the Akan, Zulus) and critically explore the relationships these "cultural" ideas have with the "global" regime of universal human rights. It will also draw upon folklore with a view to ascertaining whether traditional notions of justice conflict or concur with contemporary notions of human rights and, in cases of conflict, which should predominate. The draft course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

Human Rights and the Media

The course investigates the politics of "manufacturing consent" about the legitimacy of conflict and trauma during times of war, and it provokes questions regarding the validity of the way the media creates popular memories and their relationship to human rights. The course also encourages questions regarding:  the boundaries between history and collective memory, how media discourses function and are regarded as "truth", how media discourses disrupt and potentially shift symbolic and material systems of domination, and how the act of representation affects fundamental human rights. The draft course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

State Sovereignty and Human Rights

State sovereignty is the concept of a state’s rightful ability to govern its own internal affairs without outside interference, protecting the state's claim to equality with other states in the international system.  Though vital to the structure of this system, state sovereignty has severe implications for the nature of public international law.  In the absence of a world government, public international law remains consensual.  This course will examine some of these questions:  what are rationales for state sovereignty?  What are the major pieces of international human rights legislation?  Why has the salience of state sovereignty not stemmed the tide of such legislation?  What are the limits of sovereignty?  Which forms of intervention are permissible?  How should the UN or other states deal with states (or groups within states) that violate international human rights law? The course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

Islam and Human Rights

This course will introduce students to the discourse of Islamic Law and Human Rights. It will examine the profound tension between the competing paradigms of universal human rights and cultural and religious relativism. Some topics that will be covered will include the human rights implications of Islamic criminal law, family law, and the position of Muslim women and human rights concerns with regard to the treatment of Muslim minorities in non-Muslim states. This course is offered exclusively to students in the International Human Rights Exchange programme. The course syllabus for the 2007 program is available here.

Fourth Wits Block (September – October)

Psychosocial Perspectives on Human Rights and Social Justice

The course will address any or all of the following components: perspectives on social justice, including structural oppression and disadvantage, empowerment, needs, rights, peace and non-violence and participatory democracy; human cruelty and human rights, i.e., the psychology of abuse; identity formation and the politics of identity and subjectivity (including issues of gender, race, class, cultural identity, etc); issues of group formation and inter-group relations, including the politics of belonging, discrimination, prejudice, stereotyping and overcoming these; women's and children's rights, e.g., the causes and effects of their violations; analysis of the intersection between health policy and human rights, e.g., HIV/AIDS, discrimination and/or inclusion of disabled persons; the South African context, namely, its history of colonization, apartheid, human rights abuses, and ongoing contradictions between ideals and realities; refugees, human rights, and African challenges; legal documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the SA Bill of rights, and the SA Constitution, and their effects on society. The course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

Politics and Human Rights

The course addresses some of the following questions:  What are the origins of rights-talk in political discourse? What do rights involve?  Why are they applied to different fields? Which sorts of rights claimants can we identify?  To whom do rights apply, individuals alone or also groups?  What different kinds of rights are there?  What is the difference between communitarian and republican forms of rights discourse?  What are their strengths and limitations?  How have social movements invoked rights to advance agendas, and, in contrast, how have they criticized rights as irrelevant to their cause? The draft course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.

Human Rights and Culture

The course will address facets of the relationship between culture and human rights. Questions may include: whether a paradigm of universal human rights is consistent with the reality of diverse cultures; whether a global culture can and should emerge; whether there is a right to culture that can conflict with other human rights; how indigenous African cultures relate to the concept of human rights; what causes gross human rights violations; and how human rights have played a role in the anthropological study of culture.

The Philosophy of Human Rights

The course will critically analyze the following questions: How does the moral category of a right differ from that of desert, welfare, or duty? How do human rights differ from other kinds of rights? Who exactly is capable of having a human right? Any organism with the genetic code of homosapiens, or all persons regardless of their DNA? Are individuals alone capable of having human rights, or can groups such as nations also have them? Are we justified in believing in human rights? If so, which fundamental moral principle best grounds them? If not, what makes the idea of human rights problematic? Supposing there are human rights, when, if ever, is it permissible to violate them? May they be violated only when necessary to protect another human right, or is there some other value that can sometimes outweigh them?  The course syllabus for the 2008 program is available here.