SOCI 394: Sociology of Human Rights

SOCI 394-001: Sociology of Human Rights
(Fall 2022)

01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW

Krug Hall 7

Section Information for Fall 2022

SOCI 394 - 001: Sociology of Human Rights

The Sociology of Human Rights only recently has emerged as a formal sub-field within the discipline, yet has greatly impacted our understanding of human rights and their institutional development.  Understanding human rights requires conceptual analysis, moral judgment, and social scientific knowledge. Aside from providing a survey of sociological theory on human rights, this course examines connections between inequality, conflict, social justice, governance, and human rights under conditions of globalization and digital technological transformation, including relations and practices embedded in transnational social and political formations, information societies, and knowledge economies. We explore a number of sociologically significant questions: Why do we bother to construct a social institution of human rights? How do we meaningfully enforce them? Do understandings of justice in the Global South meaningfully shape those institutionalized as human rights, or do human rights in the name of “global justice” flow only from the North to the South?  Does the social organization upon which transnational solidarity links actors across communities of the Global North and South reflect the human rights values that they pursue? What do human rights mean to people in their local, everyday relations with each other? Why are some human rights more institutionally protected than others? How do our understandings of human agency and personhood shape the (re)production and (trans)formation of human rights? How are digital technologies transforming human rights? This course will change the way you understand yourself as a human being. Cross listed with CONF-399-002.

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Provides an overview of sociological, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding human rights. Examining connections between inequality, conflict, social justice, governance, and human rights, the course focuses on the contexts of meaning within which human rights are invoked and practiced as well as the role that non-state actors play in shaping the development and institutionalization of human rights. Limited to three attempts.
Schedule Type: Seminar
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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