Please come to class an hour early at 1pm promptly so we can ensure to get everything done.

The class has focused largely on the ways human rights are ‘always local and political’ and involve an ongoing process of contestation. We have considered a range of actors – activists, journalists, photographers, documentary makers, artists, celebrities, state bureaucrats, governments, lawyers, victims, aid workers, writers, mothers, grandparents, students, and many others – seek to name wrongs and insist on rights. We have seen the ways these actors shape and are shaped by memory, testimony, bodies, performance, objects, landscapes, ancestors, photographs, tweets, social media, and stories in pursuit of rights and justice.

The film I ask you to watch this week is called GRANITO, (from granito de arena, which loosely means grains of sand in Spanish. The film highlights how many people in vastly different areas of work come together – like grains of sand – to insist on change. It reminds us that change does not always come quickly, nor in a sweeping grand gesture, but also in the everyday lives of different people working towards it patiently over time. I hope this film will help us think about how the range of actors, processes and means explored in this class highlight this complexity, but also, possibility. I hope it will also help us think further about the important question raised last week – where do I begin, what is to be done? What kind of students, policy makers, journalists and members of a community do we strive to be? In what small and great ways we devote ourselves to rights and justice? What is our agency?

To prepare for class please:
1. Watch: Granito: How to Nail a Dictator.
2. Read: Teju Cole. A time for refusal. New York Times Magazine. and ‘The Superhero Images of the Black lives Matter Movement‘ NYT. (they are both very short)
3. Review: All of your class notes, blog posts, presentations or even revisit readings.
4. Blog: Please either highlight something you learned, unlearned, your favorite reading (and why), questions that remain, a photo or quote, or give a link to something you would like to share with the rest of the class in terms of a reading or video etc. Do as much or little as you like 🙂

There will be no class on Dec. 2 so you can have that time for working on the paper. I am available in office Tuesday Nov 22 1-3, Friday 12-1 and the following week by appointment on Tuesday or Friday.