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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Sociology

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SelectedWorks

Selected Works

2013

Human Rights

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Cultural Sociology Of Human Rights, Mark D. Jacobs, Lester R. Kurtz Jan 2013

The Cultural Sociology Of Human Rights, Mark D. Jacobs, Lester R. Kurtz

Lester R. Kurtz

These cases of China, Occupy, and Gandhi suggest the value of the sociology of culture for understanding human rights. Since human rights is a cultural construct, human rights issues are in-flected by the same set of semantic tensions as the culture concept itself. The sociology of culture thus recommends a method for studying human rights: to explicate--indeed, to weave into an exegetical deep structure--those various tensions. This helps to see beneath the distortions that power and other forms of domination introduce into the discourse of human rights, and to recognize the full multiplicity of interests and voices.


A Noble Cause: A Case Study Of Discrimination, Symbols, And Reciprocity, In: Diversity And European Human Rights, Yofi Tirosh Jan 2013

A Noble Cause: A Case Study Of Discrimination, Symbols, And Reciprocity, In: Diversity And European Human Rights, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

This chapter is part of a volume dedicated to rewriting human rights cases issued by the European Court of Human Rights. It uses the case of De La Cierva Osorio De Moscoso v. Spain (1999) as a platform to discuss the inherent tension typifying signs such as nobility titles – as merely symbolic or as carrying substantive content. The problem of one’s ownership of signs is especially acute in the case of women. I will argue that the distinction between form and substance collapses in this case, as in many other cases that involve allocation of allegedly merely symbolic signifiers …