The Places and Spaces of Human Rights Education

Abstract

This paper draws on the views of students on a human rights course concerning their reasons for choosing such a course of study, in order to highlight the importance of understanding the emotional relationship between students and their subjects. It contends that while such an understanding is important in respect of all subjects, it has a particular relevance in the topic of human rights because the nature of the material and content of the course is necessarily challenging to the humanity of the student. As such, the human rights classroom is transformed from being a space of learning to a space of feeling.

Keywords:

• human rights
• sensitive issues
• spaces of feeling
• interdisciplinarity
• curriculum

Introduction

In this paper, I assess the extent to which human rights education transcends conventional boundaries and occupies a number of simultaneous spaces. I argue that human rights, as a field of study, challenges the borders that define traditional disciplines. In its truest sense the teaching of human rights has the capacity to transform the classroom itself, from being a space of teaching and learning, in which knowledge is introduced, debated and interrogated, to being, in addition, a space of feeling, in which the motivations that drive a student towards such a course of study come to form an integral part of the educational experience.

This paper is, in part, autobiographical. It is based not on ‘research’ in any conventional, empirical sense. The ‘research’ undertaken is reflective, informed by years of experience of teaching human rights at university level. It is also informed by the voices of students. A number of students were asked to comment broadly on their motivations for pursuing a course of study in human rights, and some of their responses are interwoven into the text in a purposive way. The narrative has also been informed by focus groups and open conversations involving students and academics from various universities across Europe, facilitated by a European Union-funded TEMPUS project on human rights education in the Balkans.

Placing human rights within the curriculum

The teaching of human rights – unlike that of most established fields and disciplines – begins with a problem to which there is no easy solution. What is ‘human rights’ the study of? There is no canonical substance, no underlying consensus, on the content of human rights education, because the term ‘human rights’ is itself contested. Is it the study of a certain set of legally enforceable demands that form the basis of a contract between citizens and state, a legal approach? Is it the study of policies within and between states, of how states behave and how others relate to them, a political approach? Is it the study of the structural conditions that give rise to, and the experiences of those involved in, the great ‘crimes against humanity’, a sociological approach? Or is it the study of ethical practices, ways of behaving, a philosophical approach?

It is, of course, all of these things, and none of them. If treated solely in interdisciplinary terms, the study of human rights is about engaging with how, for example, legal definitions relate to moral ones, political to sociological, and so on. But at the same time, beyond this, in disciplinary terms in its own right, the study of human rights is about an idea that transcends all these different discourses, and articulates itself through them. The beauty of it is (from a teaching point of view at least), that there need be no common core to these different articulations. They emanate from a general discourse, and that they often actually contradict one another tells us more about the subject of human rights than we might learn had they all been in agreement. But this is a complex argument and in this Section I need to unpack it.

Michael Freeman (2002) provides a succinct evaluation of the interdisciplinary nature of human rights as an academic subject. ‘Before the 1970s', he informs us, ’almost all academic work on human rights was done by lawyers, and most articles were published in law journals' (p77). Much the same could be said about the teaching of human rights in universities (p78). However, the dominance of the legal discourse within the field of study was and remains unsatisfactory: ‘The legal approach to human rights cannot adequately analyse the ethical, political, sociological, economic and anthropological dimensions of human rights. Human rights law has social and political origins, and social and political consequences … ’ (p78).

For sure, the issue of academic disciplinarity is challenging for the teacher and learner of human rights. As a field of study it lends itself to interdisciplinarity, drawing as it does not only on law but on philosophy, international relations, political science, sociology, anthropology, theology, education, history, social psychology and more besides, but – at the same time – to contradictions and disagreements over its core concerns from across the disciplinary divide – each component discipline may feel it has a legitimate case to make for ‘owning’ the concept. In truth, such internal debates strengthen rather than weaken the intellectual integrity of the study of human rights, while debates over intellectual ‘ownership’ are misleading and potentially damaging to the possibilities of human rights education. Freeman's point about the dominance of law, for example, is a case in point. Yes, human rights are legal concepts. And yes, for human rights to be protected, there needs to be a legal discourse of them. And so, yes again, any human rights education worthy of the name must involve an engagement with and an understanding of human rights law. But, at the same time, human rights are not solely legal concepts. They are also moral concepts – claims about that which is ‘right’ and ‘good’, political concepts – demands made for the purpose of empowerment, and social concepts – articulations of a common discourse about the organisation of society.

The relationship between the academic study of human rights and the disciplines has been taken up previously by the author of this article, for whom it is possible to treat human rights ‘as a discipline in its own right’ (O'Byrne 2012 italics in original). As such:

Its logic … is the promotion of human rights awareness and its ultimate goal the eradication of all forms of human rights abuse. Thus, the discipline of human rights is more than a mere potpourri of interests drawn from other, more traditional fields. It occupies its own space, located broadly within the social sciences but as far removed from the fallacies of value freedom and scientific objectivity as any discipline could possibly be. (O'Byrne 2003, p2)

‘But’, O'Byrne goes on:

… if there is to be a disciplinary logic to the integrated study of human rights, it must reside primarily in its resistance to any separation between academic research and the ‘real world’ of human rights abuses. The purpose of human rights studies is to utilise this research for the advancement of an overt political and ethical goal, that is, the betterment of human existence. (O'Byrne 2003, p3)

Clearly, this passion underpinning such an intellectual integrity echoes Herbert Marcuse's famous defence of critical, as opposed to positivist or interpretive, theory.

This is precisely why the teaching of human rights in the university is not reducible either to the teaching of human rights law or to the delivery of what has become known as ‘citizenship education’ – even the often subversive field of ‘education for world citizenship’. When the concept of human rights becomes reduced solely to the language of legal entitlements or the language of citizenship it becomes exclusive, arbitrary and relative – and easily politicised. At the same time, the teaching of human rights needs to recognise and be inclusive of multiple discourses. The generic language of human rights is an open discourse, within which exist various schemas for codifying and defining human rights (of which, for example, the Western liberal tradition, which prioritises civil and political rights and freedoms of the individual, has become dominant in much of the world). These schemas contribute to the general language but are not synonymous with it, and human rights education needs to reflect that. Human rights education cannot be an instrument for reproducing a single ideology or philosophy (imagine the uproar if psychology courses presented behaviourism as the only framework available to students!). Rather, it must accommodate a space in which alternative perspectives are discussed, and this is only possible through an engagement with the experiences, sentiments and motivations of students. I will develop this point below.

In my own teaching I make the point in the very first lecture to all students of human rights – undergraduate and postgraduate – that to study human rights as an academic programme is not to study one specific definition, any more than it is to accept one ideological position on what constitutes those human rights themselves. Something is not inherently a human rights issue – it has to be articulated as such. This is precisely the approach that has informed practitioner groups in recent years – campaigns over the environment and global development were largely, historically, seen as distinct from human rights campaigns, but it is now not uncommon for such campaigns to be housed within a ‘rights-based framework’. The language of rights has replaced the language of needs as the primary language of demands (Miller 2010). And this tells us precisely what the concept of human rights really is – not a legal concept or a sociological or political or even philosophical one but the expression of a desire (Douzinas 2000), or, to put it another way, a language we use to articulate the preferred kind of society we would want to live in, an ideal form of social organisation derived from minimal standards (O'Byrne 2012).

If we understand this, then we are better placed to provide a form of human rights education that does not privilege one disciplinary approach or another, or merely reflect the values of one particular ideology (such as the dominant liberal tradition). By revealing and revelling in the emptiness of the generic human rights discourse, we are better positioned as teachers to use it within the context of education as critical thinking. In other words, teaching human rights should not and indeed cannot be just about the ‘formal teaching’ of acts and events but must provide an opportunity for students to develop their own understanding of what ‘human rights’ means. And, in the same vein, staff teaching it will necessarily come at it from different definitions, as there is no one set definition of what human rights ‘are’ and part of the project must be to help students recognise that and not assume human rights must be synonymous with their use within the dominant liberal tradition, or any other tradition for that matter.

Not, of course, that students and faculty always assume this to be the case. Responses from students in focus groups both in the UK and elsewhere on what they might expect from a class in human rights have revealed considerable sensitivity towards the complexity of the term, and surprising overlap with the views of faculty. This is the case not only where the subject is taught in more fluid areas such as sociology, but also in more rigid ones such as law. More often than not, it is not the teachers or the students who restrict the content of a human rights class to clearly defined disciplinary approaches, but the enforced inflexibility of the disciplines themselves, bound up as they so often are in the language of subject benchmarks, curriculum aims and learning outcomes, quality assurance indicators, and professional standards.

In other words, the first order of business of any intellectual discussion about human rights should be to criticise the very idea of human rights! Yet this is necessary if the discourse is to be opened up and reoccupied. I recall a good-natured comment from one student at my institution, who had hitherto been a human rights activist in West Africa, that after a year of studying human rights he had come to challenge every assumption he had about the subject, everything he thought he knew. This was praise indeed, for a job clearly well done! Few writers in recent years have expressed the importance of this better than Douzinas, who concludes his challenging critique of the ideological appropriation of the language of human rights thus:

When the apologists of pragmatism pronounce the end of ideology, of history or utopia, they do not mark the triumph of human rights; on the contrary, they bring human rights to an end. The end of human rights comes when they lose their utopian end. (Douzinas 2000, p380)

Spaces of feeling

What concerns me here is the extent to which the classroom moves from being a space of learning to being a space of feeling. This is not an easy concept to define – clearly it has its roots in many long-standing approaches to education, primarily the ‘experiential education’ tradition pioneered by Dewey and refined by Rorty in the form of ‘sentimental education’. It derives from the democratic tradition in education, which states that a balanced discussion is essential for the learning process (see Brookfield & Preskill 2005). This of course is particularly relevant when the topic is human rights.

But this is not simply a pedagogical issue. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the emotional bond between the student and her or his chosen subject, and thus to see the education experience as being in part, whether explicitly or implicitly, about learning to understand and manage one's feelings. Nor is it easily reduced, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, to epistemological debates. There is nothing inherent in this concept that renders it incompatible with the teaching of mathematics or science, nor need it be the case that it is incompatible with positivist epistemologies. But it is in the human rights classroom that the concept becomes most noticeable and, one might add, significant.

Educationalists have for a long time been concerned with the teaching of emotionally challenging, sensitive, or sometimes extremely disturbing, material. There is a rich tradition of research on the best strategies for teachers to use when introducing such content, on how students might best cope with such material, and on how the emotions engendered within this dynamic might serve to improve the learning experience. Much of this literature focuses on how to incorporate and engage with material dealing with issues that arise in classes across the disciplinary spectrum that may be personally sensitive for some students (or teachers) – for example, discussing sexuality, which in much (but of course not all) of the world is not problematic in a legal sense, or discussing prejudices or ethnic and religious differences that force the student to some extent to embed herself or himself into the discussion. A good example of the latter is provided by Klesse (2010), who incorporates the concept of positionality in respect of students and lecturers and argues that the acknowledgement of different positionalities is essential in enabling a meaningful dialogue on issues of ‘race’.

Related to this literature is that which focuses on the inclusion of sensitive material into the classroom, i.e. material which challenges preconceptions and wider social norms. Lichtenstein (2010) provides some insight into this through her account of teaching about HIV in America's Deep South, for which she draws heavily on Mills' concept of the ‘sociological imagination’. Similarly, Norton & Oerton (2010) discuss the challenges and opportunities presented in exposing students to sexually explicit material.

The material I am referring to is slightly different in that for the vast majority of students in the class it is entirely objective (in so far as the material does not intrude upon some sensitive aspect of the students' identity), but which is difficult to take not only because it exposes the students to the stark reality of violence but because it challenges the students' humanity, their sense of what is and is not acceptable in the world and desire to ‘do something’ about it. In such cases, the response that has to be managed in the classroom is not the personal sensitivity that might manifest itself as anxiety or embarrassment, but the ethical sensitivity that manifests itself as shock or disgust. In respect of the benefits of using such material in class, Dalton (2010) asks us to be guided by an ‘ethics of care’, a moral duty ‘to minimise the potentially deleterious impact of exposing students to sensitive material’, which of course does not mean providing false guarantees that students will not be disturbed by such material (any more than it does avoiding its use in the first place), but rather allowing students time and space to prepare for the discussion, with the lecturer asking: ‘What can I do to help you look after yourself in relation to these classes?’

In the field of human rights, of course, such content is not so much an exception as the rule, central to the purpose of the field of study itself. In the human rights classroom, students and teachers engage in discussions about the realities of executions, torture, enslavement, genocide, and violence. Case studies are often used, many containing vivid descriptions of brutalities, and these are not merely for dramatic effect. When faced with such horrors it seems only natural that the classroom itself becomes a space in which students not only have to contemplate these realities but are able to express the effects upon themselves in the company of like-minded others – in other words, the classroom becomes a private space defined by a sense of shared experiences.

But the concept of ‘spaces of feeling’ is not designed to refer solely to the extent to which the classroom might become a space for catharsis and self-reflection following challenging discussions. It refers also to the extent to which the classroom provides a far more routine kind of emotional sanctuary. Here, it is not the content per se that engenders the ‘feeling’, but the idea of the subject itself. It is not just about coping with emotionally challenging material, but about understanding the motivations that drive one to learn about it in the first place.

A beautiful illustration of this is provided by a former student, now armed with a sufficiently advanced intellectual armoury as to invoke the spirit of Heidegger and of Deleuze and Guattari. He says:

I first came to human rights', he says, ‘because of what happens in Mrs Roosevelt's ‘small places, close to home’ … When I came to study a human rights degree … I came across a belief in the necessity … to forge a space in which to think about being in the world in order to produce an ethic of care. At that time, I realised that the human rights undergraduate programme was such a space … I have come to see the programme more as a plateau … in that it continues to be always between things, becoming, constantly de-territorialising and re-territorialising through myriad possibilities.

Another student informs:

I was raised in South Africa during the Apartheid and although I was lucky that my parents tried to shield me from a lot of what happened, they could only hide so much. This is I think the initial reason that I wanted to study a course focused on human rights, the other I believe is built in every student that does study human rights, it is more than just a wish to have a career, it is something that you have to believe in.

In other words, the space of feeling provided by the human rights classroom exists on dual planes and forges a bond between them, between the personal and the communal. Personal feeling for the subject need not be dictated by direct personal experience, of course. One younger student tells us:

My local library first put me in contact with the fact that the world is an unjust place. When I was eleven years old I saw a play at my library about child labour in carpet factories, I read books about boys with legs blown off by mine fields. I didn't know what to do with these feelings of injustice and utter incomprehensibility as to how it was possible that this even took place. Luckily I found this degree that finally began to teach me what I had been longing to learn for a long time.

One mature student writes:

My interest in human rights stems originally from the education I received at home and is something I became aware of through osmosis. My grandmother was a fund raiser for Amnesty International in the 1960s and '70s. And I was an eager volunteer to help out from the age of eight years old and onwards. I spent part of my education at a Quaker boarding school … and I feel that I have absorbed many social and moral principles based on my background. I am extremely proud of the fact that my grandmother had been a volunteer social worker in the 1920s, and that she was actively involved in helping refugee children escape from Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. She was also twenty four years old when women got the right to vote, and I regret deeply that she spoke so little of these achievements and that I only came to learn of them after she had died.

A younger student gives her account:

I completed my A-levels in 2006 … I was every teacher's dream student; I turned up to lessons, did my homework and excelled in exams. I went to university because that's what was expected of me.

The student goes on to explain that she turned down a place at a prestigious London institution because she ‘didn’t like the feel of it', which irritated her teachers who saw her as Golden Triangle material. She went instead to study psychology at another highly ranked London college. ‘I began my psychology BSc and loved every minute of it’, she continues. ‘I completed my first year and went on to my second … I passed my second year with a first, and was predicted good things for my third year’. However, things were about to take an unexpected turn:

In June 2008 I … decided to travel to India and spend the summer there, teaching and travelling. The next two months were the most influential of my life … and when I returned home I made some truly life changing decisions … which made me log onto UCAS and search for human rights courses. I found two. I then decided to come home, quit my psychology degree two years in, take a year out to save up … and apply to [the author's institution] to study human rights. I got in and I haven't looked back or regretted anything since.

I want to go back to India once I've graduated, when I know enough to act on what I see, and this is why human rights education is so important, we all know when something is wrong, but we don't always know what to do about it, to help make it right. For a lot of my friends and family it's an ongoing joke, I'll have been at university for five years when I graduate, and spent a large amount of money on it, they all reckon I should've just done medicine or something after all; but I don't mind I take it on the chin because it's all worth it; most of my friends graduated last year with a mixture of computer science, classical studies, English literature, psychology, politics and French, I know I'm biased, but I still think my degree is the best, and that I'll make the most difference with what I learn in my three years at University.

These testimonies demonstrate the importance of understanding the relationship between the student and the subject they come to study. Frequently, the student is asking that the subject should have some bearing on how they think and feel about the world. For example, if the prospective sociology student at interview were to declare: ‘I like people and I want sociology to help me understand what people are like’, there would actually be more merit in this statement than might at first appear. This, I believe, applies even more so in the case of students who come to study human rights. Although they may not be able to articulate it clearly they have a passionate commitment to human dignity and to challenging infringements of human rights. They may not understand a great deal about the history and politics of human rights but they do want the subject of human rights to extend and deepen their understanding, passion and commitment.

Human rights are always and everywhere being defined, redefined and codified in juridical and academic work but also, and probably more importantly, within those everyday contexts within which human rights are being contested, promoted, defended and protected. These are the practical contexts of human rights with which the students become most familiar. Even before they arrive students are already moving beyond the purely contemplative seeking to forge ways of practically engaging with the subject. Their commitments force the discipline to abjure ideas of value neutrality and this has serious implications for what happens in the classroom and beyond.

Beyond the teaching of human rights as a perceived body of knowledge, beyond even the teaching of critical skills embedded in notions of world citizenship, the human rights classroom becomes a space of self-reflection – the student cited above searched for and found a space in which the complexities she had encountered could be engaged with, and better understood. The traditional disciplines that inform the interdisciplinary curriculum provide a range of tools to help her in that respect – some she will embrace, others she will discard. In the human rights classroom, there is no ‘canon’ which must be regarded above all others; there are instead pathways along which the student can travel in her quest to manage her own feelings. No teacher and no text-book can tell her how she will best achieve this goal. The path she finds most appealing, the tools she opts to make use of, whether she becomes a philosopher or a lawyer or something else entirely, are matters of choice, and her choice might very well be different to that of the former immigration detention centre detainee, the torture victim, the African refugee involved in a complex asylum arrangement in Germany, the student who found the body of a dead Chinese cockle-picker at Morecambe Bay, the student whose grandparents died at Auschwitz, the African dissident, the son of an African dissident, or the mature student whose entire family was murdered in a genocide in her home country.

Nor, of course, is this limited to the student. Many involved in the teaching of human rights will also be drawn to it as an opportunity to find a space in which to manage their feelings. And, for sure, there is no easy answer to the question of how this classroom experience can actually be managed. There are many pedagogical questions raised herein which cannot be addressed within the confines of this paper, but which need addressing.

Conclusion

I have suggested that where a human rights education takes place, the spaces it occupies in the university curriculum and the spaces accorded to feelings within it are all central to understanding what lies at the heart of human rights in the university.

However, I recognise that tensions exist between the ideals of the kind of human rights education I am endorsing and the reality of university politics and university economics. Higher education in the UK has for the past two decades been undergoing a process of commodification and increasing managerialism in the wake of successive government policies informed by neo-liberal ideology (Bond & O'Byrne 2013). Nobody denies that university management is a difficult task. The manager must somehow balance a range of conflicting demands: the demands of students who are increasingly presented as consumers (hence the endless and often empty rhetoric about employability and student satisfaction); the demands of the managerial elite who are required to run the university as a business, answerable to the laws of supply and demand; and the demands of the academic community, which maintains a commitment to the value of knowledge for its own sake. One might suggest that the politics of higher education is increasingly dominated by competing dialogues – between consumers and managers as partners, between managers and academics as enemies, between consumers and academics as competitors for legitimacy. A meaningful human rights education is unlikely to survive in such a confused context, in the current climate in which university ‘success’ is measured in terms of market forces rather than critical self-reflection.

I wrote the first draft of this piece just as my own university had announced the closure of the undergraduate human rights programme that spawned the testimonies I presented earlier. As a result, the paper was written less as a celebration of the potential of human rights education, than as an obituary. But there are casualties in war, and though the programme itself has since been lost, what cannot be lost is the idea that underpinned it. This is the point that managers often fail to hear – that for students on such a programme, the issue is not about employability in any direct instrumentalist sense, but about an idea. This is about the fact that if done well, human rights education can open up a ‘space of feeling’ that better serves the true purpose of education than any simplistic agenda about ‘skills’ ever could. This is about the reality that, despite the views of some involved in university management, feelings are more than mere luxuries – they actually matter.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank David Woodman, Julie Hall and Christopher Bond for advice on the writing of this paper, and all the students who kindly contributed their thoughts. This paper is dedicated to all students on the programme, with thanks.