Seminar Leaders
Kundai Chirindo, Lewis and Clark College
Wendy S. Hesford, Ohio State University
Arabella Lyon, University at Buffalo
The rhetorics of human rights are far more diverse than those common in Western conceptions. To recognize human diversity—including a diversity of rights traditions—interpretations and representations of rights should acknowledge the confluence and conflicts of rights systems. Many rhetorical scholars have connected human rights rhetoric and transnationalism (Dingo, Hesford, Kozol, Lyon, Wang, Yam), arguing for transnational theory as a method for discovering the power dynamics within contacts across cultures and borders. Identifying transnationalism as interactions among texts, cultures and knowledges, the seminar will take diverse approaches to analyzing the manufacture and distribution of rights. Our studies will be committed to recognizing social justice movements, particularly BLM and other movements for racial justice, and we will attend to how their rhetorical tactics have mobilized intersectional and transnational understandings of human rights.
This seminar will explore comparative and transnational rhetorical approaches to critical human rights and difference. We will explore questions such as: What are the cultural origins of rights rhetorics, particularly those outside the Western tradition? How do common human rights discourses employ racialized and gendered representations to reinforce state power and build capitalist networks? How do subjects claim rights that are denied?
Note: This seminar has limited space for remote participation.
Kundai Chirindo is an Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Media Studies department, and Director of General Education at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His critical essays have appeared in Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Argumentation & Advocacy, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Women’s Studies in Communication, and in edited volumes.
Wendy S. Hesford is an Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of English and Director for the Global Arts + Humanities at The Ohio State University. She has published seven books, most recently Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics, which redirects research in rhetorical studies to the material-rhetoric of emergency and to the consequences of humanitarian orientations to children’s human rights.
Arabella Lyon is Professor Emeritus of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of two award winning books, Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored and Deliberation: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights, and dozens of articles on comparative rhetoric, deliberation, and human rights.