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Full-Text Articles in Law
The State, The Udhr, And The Social Construction Of Family In Human Rights: The Case Of The Scarborough 11, Abbey S. Willis, Mary C. Burke, Davita Silfen Glasberg
The State, The Udhr, And The Social Construction Of Family In Human Rights: The Case Of The Scarborough 11, Abbey S. Willis, Mary C. Burke, Davita Silfen Glasberg
Societies Without Borders
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (UN 1947:34) declares in Article 16(3) that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to the full protection by society and the state.” However, the UDHR does not define family, but rather presumes it is defined by traditional heteronormative marriage in a nuclear family. The failure of the UDHR to consider a more expansive view of family leaves the definition of family centrally in the hands of the state, and affects the ability of all but traditional nuclear family forms to access other human rights. We …
“Labor For Love, Labor To Heal:” Human Rights Activism As A Politics Of Refusal, Angela E. Fillingim
“Labor For Love, Labor To Heal:” Human Rights Activism As A Politics Of Refusal, Angela E. Fillingim
Societies Without Borders
The literature on social movements centers demands made on the state and theorizes collective action as rooted in specific times and the nation-state. I ague that this literature is analogous to “the veil,” a concept developed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Indigenous theorizations of a “politics of refusal” provides us with a foundation see beyond the veil. This paper brings together “Du Boisian Sociology,” Latina Feminisms, and indigenous theories of collective action to develop a robust theorization of human rights activism, and social movements more broadly. This paper asks: What can we gain from analyzing movements from beyond the veil by …
Understanding And Promoting The Human Rights Of Autistic People, Keri E. Iyall Smith Phd
Understanding And Promoting The Human Rights Of Autistic People, Keri E. Iyall Smith Phd
Societies Without Borders
Rates of autism diagnosis are on the rise and autistic people are entering the public sphere in new ways, represented in theater, on television, as international experts, and more. Yet, do autistic people experience their full human rights? Experts argue that autistic people suffer discrimination and violations of their human rights, noting that more must be done to ensure the full entitlement of human rights for autistic people (Autism Society ND, Baron-Cohen 2017 and Sarrett 2012). To better understand and promote the human rights of autistic people, this paper applies theories of disability to autism, looking at the biomedical model, …
Who Says Human Rights Are Not Respected? A Cross-National Comparison Of Objective And Subjective Ratings, Rob Clark
Societies Without Borders
Country ratings of human rights conditions are now quite popular in macro comparative analysis. However, little is known as to whether (or to what extent) these scores correspond with mass sentiment in each country. Do “objective” ratings from the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli-Richards index (CIRI) correspond with “subjective” ratings issued by the public? In this study, I answer this question, drawing from the most recent wave of the World Values Survey (2010 – 2014), in which respondents from 59 countries are asked to assess the level of respect for individual human rights in their country. The findings …
Thinking Globall, Acting Locally: Cedaw And Women's Human Rights In San Francisco, Susan Hagood Lee Phd
Thinking Globall, Acting Locally: Cedaw And Women's Human Rights In San Francisco, Susan Hagood Lee Phd
Societies Without Borders
While the United States has ratified many of the international human rights treaties, some have been left languishing in the Senate including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In response to Senate failure to ratify the women's treaty, the city of San Francisco passed its own CEDAW ordinance in 1998 to implement the principles of women's human rights in its jurisdiction. Several factors contributed to the successful passage of the CEDAW ordinance, including a sturdy base of feminist institutions developed over three decades of women's activism, determined leadership with the commitment, skills, and …
Revisiting The Role Of Education In Global Society: Relevance Of The Concept Of “Value Generalization” In An Educational Context, Matteo Tracchi Phd
Revisiting The Role Of Education In Global Society: Relevance Of The Concept Of “Value Generalization” In An Educational Context, Matteo Tracchi Phd
Societies Without Borders
Interpreting global society through the morphogenetic approach, the article looks at education as one of the dimensions of social change brought about by the plural process of globalization. The role and vision of education will therefore be questioned to finally claim that education has to be revisited in culturally diverse and complex global societies. Necessary steps include moving from a market- to a human-centred approach to education and taking the paradigm of human rights as the universal point of departure. Indeed, framing the concept of “value generalization” (Joas 2013) within an educational context, the paper argues that human rights should …
The Technology Bias: What Google Teaches Us About Child Rights, Yvonne Vissing Ph.D, Sarah Burris M.A., Quixada Moore-Vissing Ph.D
The Technology Bias: What Google Teaches Us About Child Rights, Yvonne Vissing Ph.D, Sarah Burris M.A., Quixada Moore-Vissing Ph.D
Societies Without Borders
Technology both helps and hinders what we know about human rights. Use of Google is of central importance to both the Sociology of Knowledge and the creation of internet literacy. In this study, different search engines are compared regarding content of “child rights” in the fifty United States. Findings include: importance of algorithmic loading of sites; number of hits may not reflect the importance or accuracy of a topic; different search engines produce different findings; and personalized searches result in different results. Personalization of searches in accordance to one’s previous search history may result in people being given information that …
Making Visible The Invisible: Nighttime Lights Data And The Closing Of The Human Rights Information Gap, Xi Chen
Societies Without Borders
War, poverty, geographical remoteness and political isolation all contribute to unreliable or non-existent data for developing regions of the world. As a consequence, research within these areas has been hampered by an abject lack of data in underdeveloped regions. The satellite-based nighttime lights data introduced here may hold the potential to overcome this problem by providing a proxy measure for large numbers of variables dealing with second and third generation human rights issues. The images presented here represent some of the newest forms of data available to social science investigations and those interested in human rights studies, and are already …
African American Women, Hiv/Aids, And Human Rights In The Us, Monica L. Melton
African American Women, Hiv/Aids, And Human Rights In The Us, Monica L. Melton
Societies Without Borders
In the US alone, 84 percent of women’s HIV infections are due to heterosexual contact (CDC 2013). Fifty percent of all people globally who are living with HIV/AIDS are women (UNAIDS 2009), yet, HIV-positive women’s perspectives on prevention are mostly missing from the trajectory of scholarly literature on HIV/AIDS. I thought it imperative to go to the source (women living with HIV/AIDS) to get an insiders perspective on HIV prevention. Thirty HIV-positive Black women were recruited to participate in the study, which lasted seven months. These women live in a Florida innercity and range in age from 21 to 60. …
Political Battles On Women’S Bodies: Post-Election Conflicts And Violence Against Women In Internally Displaced Persons Camps In Kenya, Roseanne Njeri Njiru
Political Battles On Women’S Bodies: Post-Election Conflicts And Violence Against Women In Internally Displaced Persons Camps In Kenya, Roseanne Njeri Njiru
Societies Without Borders
The Kenya 2007 December presidential election results were violently challenged. For months, political protests accompanied by violent attacks and violent reaction by government security forces, led to “ethnic cleansing” particularly in the Rift Valley region resulting in deaths of more than 1,500 people and internal displacement of about 450,000 others. Women and young girls experienced various forms of gender violence during and after the conflicts in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Using in-depth interviews with women living in a camp, NGOs and government agencies, this article focuses on the continuing bodily violence that internally displaced women face in their everyday …
The “Arab Spring” And Its Theoretical Significance: Samuel Huntington’S Theory, “The Clash Of Civilizations,” Revisited, Mahmoud "Max" Kashefi
The “Arab Spring” And Its Theoretical Significance: Samuel Huntington’S Theory, “The Clash Of Civilizations,” Revisited, Mahmoud "Max" Kashefi
Societies Without Borders
Using the characteristics and the demands of the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa or so called “Arab Spring,” this study questions the significance of some propositions deduced from Huntington’ popular theory of “The Clash of Civilizations.” The research asserts that globalization, especially the development of new technology, has created opportunities for the new generations in the region to be acculturated with a set of values reflecting their basic civilian and human rights. The new values, while credited with the development in the West, belong to all human beings and are gaining the status of universal human …
Mobilization After Repression: Reconsidering The Role Of Testimonies And Exiles In Post-War El Salvador, Angela Elena Fillingim
Mobilization After Repression: Reconsidering The Role Of Testimonies And Exiles In Post-War El Salvador, Angela Elena Fillingim
Societies Without Borders
During the civil war in El Salvador, the Salvadoran military engaged in the systematic disappearance of youth and facilitated their adoptions. Presently Found, a Salvadoran human rights NGO, works to reunite these youth with their surviving biological families. However, a key difference between Found and other similar organizations, is that the former was established in the post-war context. Through a case study of Found, and placed in comparative light with a similar phenomenon in Argentina, I will show that traditional mobilization strategies face new obstacles in a post-war context. Specifically, while Found engaged in many of the same movement tactics …
Food: A Human Rights Issue Ignored In Sociology, Kathryn Strother Ratcliff, Trisha Tiamzon
Food: A Human Rights Issue Ignored In Sociology, Kathryn Strother Ratcliff, Trisha Tiamzon
Societies Without Borders
Mainstream sociology, including the sociology of health, has been remiss by ignoring food as an important human right both in the United States and globally. This article documents the neglect of food as a topic of sociological inquiry and argues for the centrality of a sociological lens in understanding food as a human right. Sociological ideas are important in understanding forces which have encouraged the globalization of food production and distribution, decreased the equality of access to nutritious food, and threatened core human rights. Sociologists as teachers and researchers need to become academic activists on this important human rights topic.
Challenges In Localizing Global Human Rights, Ranita Ray, Badana Purkayastha
Challenges In Localizing Global Human Rights, Ranita Ray, Badana Purkayastha
Societies Without Borders
Drawing from ethnographic and historical data combined with document analysis, this article addresses two issues related to the mechanisms involved in localizing global human rights ideas: 1) the disharmony that may results when global ideas are concretized in the form of domestic laws and come in conflict with the ever shifting local rights consciousness and 2) the role of habitus in determining how human rights advocates respond to changing local rights consciousness. By examining the ways in which violence against women is addressed by a human rights commission in an Indian state, the disjuncture between local appropriations of global human …
The Failures And Possibilities Of A Human Rights Approach To Secure Native American Women’S Reproductive Justice, Barbara Gurr
The Failures And Possibilities Of A Human Rights Approach To Secure Native American Women’S Reproductive Justice, Barbara Gurr
Societies Without Borders
This article has three purposes: the first is to bring to light current violations of Native American women’s basic right to health as these violations are produced by the federal government and imposed through the Indian Health Service. The second is to articulate the challenges of current human rights discourse in articulating and providing for Native Americans’ human rights within the United States. Third, this article offers a potential strategy for understanding and redressing the violation of Native women’s right to health through the rubric of reproductive justice. Drawing from over ten years of participant observation as well as semi-structured …
Indirect Violence And Legitimation: Torture, Surrogacy, And The U.S. War On Terror, Eric Bonds
Indirect Violence And Legitimation: Torture, Surrogacy, And The U.S. War On Terror, Eric Bonds
Societies Without Borders
This paper contributes to the sociological study of legitimation, specifically focusing on the state legitimation of torture and other forms of violence that violate international normative standards. While sociologists have identified important discursive techniques of legitimation, this paper suggests that researchers should also look at state practices where concerns regarding legitimacy are “built in” to the very practice of certain forms of violence. Specifically, the paper focuses on surrogacy, through which powerful states may direct or benefit from the violence carried out by client states or other armed groups while at the same time attempting to appear separate from and …
“American Exceptionalism”—On What End Of The Continuum?, Assem Hasnain, Josh King, Judith Blau
“American Exceptionalism”—On What End Of The Continuum?, Assem Hasnain, Josh King, Judith Blau
Societies Without Borders
This paper draws from global understandings about Human Rights, recasting them in terms of a sociological conception of the dimensions of a Decent Society. We pose our questions within the framework of American Exceptionalism, because the assumptions that underlie that term have never been empirically examined. Can we conclude on the basis of this analysis that America, when compared with other countries, advances human rights? No. Can we conclude on the basis of this analysis that America, when compared with other countries, is a Decent Society? No. Can we conclude on the basis of this empirical analysis that America, when …
What Does A Sociology Without Borders Look Like?, Tanya Golash-Boza
What Does A Sociology Without Borders Look Like?, Tanya Golash-Boza
Societies Without Borders
In this essay, I consider what a sociology without borders would look like through an exploration of two questions: 1) How can sociology be mobilized to make the world a better place? and 2) What does a sociology of human rights look like? To answer these questions, I take the reader through a discussion of the history of Sociologists without Borders, the influence of Professor Judith Blau, and my own excursions into the sociology of human rights in the United States and abroad.
To Be A Sociologist Without Borders, Judith Blau, Keri E. Iyall Smith
To Be A Sociologist Without Borders, Judith Blau, Keri E. Iyall Smith
Societies Without Borders
In a conversation with Keri E. Iyall Smith, Judith R. Blau shares her thoughts on the early days of Sociologists Without Borders/Sociólogos Sin Fronteras (SSF). She explains the impetus for the organization and some of its early victories. She then describes her work today with the Human Rights Center (HRC), where members of Carrboro and Chapel Hill are working together to live the dream of human rights.
Of Tools And Houses: Sociologists Without Borders And The Aaas Science And Human Rights Coalition, Bruce K. Friesen, Mark Frezzo, Brian K. Gran
Of Tools And Houses: Sociologists Without Borders And The Aaas Science And Human Rights Coalition, Bruce K. Friesen, Mark Frezzo, Brian K. Gran
Societies Without Borders
Sociologists Without Borders (SSF) has played a key role in the Science and Human Rights Coalition (SHRC) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This Coalition, which consists of nearly fifty scientific organizations, seeks to advance the human right to benefit from scientific progress and its application. This article critically evaluates SSF’s role in the SHRC. After providing background on the work, organization, and objectives of the Coalition, this article then elaborates on how sociologists, particularly representatives of the American Sociological Association and SSF, have collaborated with other scientists on various projects designed to implement this human right. …