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Flyer: 2023 Conference, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

Promotional flyer: The University of Dayton Human Rights Center, the Centre for Human Rights of the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, and the University of the Free State Centre for Human Rights, South Africa, jointly convene the 2023 Social Practice of Human Rights Conference and the 6th International Conference on the Right to Development, set for Nov. 2-4, 2023.

The call for proposals is now available, and submissions are open through May 8, 2023.

Call For Proposals 2023: The Social Practice Of Human Rights And The And The 6th International Conference On The Right To Development, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

Call for proposals: We welcome contributions that focus on the following sub-themes or any related topic:

• Inclusive development — redistributive models; business and human rights; rights-based economies and financial institutions; global supply chains; inequalities; and Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
  
  
• Social transformation, movements, and resistance — new forms of civic and cultural engagement, education, and pedagogy; the intersection of theater, art and activism; music, performance, and visual culture; new technologies; resistance to anti-rights movements; and democratic fragility.
  
  
• Climate change and sustainability — climate and environmental justice; ecological disaster; natural resources exploitation; building sustainable futures; corporate interests; and fiscal …

Call For Proposals 2021: The Social Practice Of Human Rights Conference, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

The global pandemic has rapidly broken down boundaries and structures—from personal to social to institutional. Long-standing practices and norms have changed radically to respond to the current crisis, while some institutional and political dynamics contrary to human rights and democracy have become further entrenched. New pressures on human rights are also heightened by the pandemic, including rights to privacy, access to health, and digital capitalism. This crisis has shown that for human rights, the perils and potentials have increased hand in hand.

The stark upending by the pandemic provides proof-of-concept for the disintegration of silos and the erosion of exclusionary …

Call For Proposals 2019: The Social Practice Of Human Rights, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

2019 marks 30 years since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of an era pregnant with promise and potential for human rights, democracy, and global governance.

Yet today, global capitalism drives widening and deepening inequalities. Its dependence on natural resource extraction and exploitation is hastening ecological collapse. Authoritarianism and populism have risen from the rubble of liberalism’s inability to deliver on its pledges. Technology, once promoted as a panacea for transnational boundary breaking and democratization, further empowers the powerful to reshape politics and upend notions of privacy, social life, information, employment, and even biology.

Critics have questioned …

Faith-Based Civil Society Organizations And The Protection Of Victims Of Human Rights Abuses In Nigeria, Nathaniel Umukoro

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Nigeria has witnessed various forms of human rights violations such as extrajudicial killings, rape, and torture during both military and civilian regimes. Amnesty International, the U.S. State Department, and the Political Terror Scale of the Centre for Systemic Peace indicate that Nigeria is a country characterized by generalized human rights violations.

Over the years, several scholars have examined the causes, nature, responses of the state, and reasons for the persistence of human rights violations in Nigeria. A careful consideration of these studies indicates that the role of faith-based civil society organizations in the protection of victims of human rights abuses …

The Power And Pathologies Of Language: How Human Rights Messaging Can Also Affect Support For Violent Non-State Actors, Alexandra Haines, Michele Leiby, Matthew Krain

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Are framing strategies that are effective at encouraging pro-social behavior such as participation in human rights campaigns also effective at mobilizing support for “anti-social” and violent causes? Using an experimental research design, we seek to understand under what conditions individuals will express support for retributive violent action.

We hypothesize that a personal story of victimization, wherein the humanity and vulnerability of the victim and the intensity of the violence suffered are described in vivid detail, will be necessary and sufficient to cause the audience to express support for the victim’s subsequent participation in organized, retaliatory violence. We expect that personal …

Faith-Based Resistance, Human Rights, And Emancipatory Practices, Curtis Kline

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Progressive political theologies can expand and deepen both the strength and the conceptualization of human rights advocacy. However, not all political theologies are an effort to defend human dignity; neither are all understandings and practices of human rights. The validation of progressive political theologies as well as the validation of human rights conceptualizations comes from their capacity to concretely change the lived reality of poor and oppressed peoples of the world.

As with political theologies, there is a constant struggle over the control of how to conceptualize what constitutes a human rights issue. While many communities of faith find liberating …

2017 Conference Program, University Of Dayton Human Rights Center

Human Rights Program Documents

We come together at a challenging time. Sixty-five million forcibly displaced persons. More than forty million slaves. Democracy under attack. Nuclear weapons, ethnic cleansing, ecological disasters and racial injustice headlining the news. The resurgence of a hardline, nativist intolerance around the world. While there are many threats to the realization of universal human rights, there are many powerful tools we can use to confront these dangers. Chief among these is our growing ability to come together, to communicate, to collaborate.

The University of Dayton — a Catholic, Marianist research university — long has been a center of programming, dialogue and …

Social Violence: The Role Of Gun Culture, Binod Kumar

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

The roots of violence are many because they sprout from diverse sources. Often the sources interact and confound to make violence a complex societal phenomenon. In the context of this chapter, violence is defined as intents and/or acts of doing harm to an individual or a group of people. Violence is thus a very broad term and encompasses numerous social and political grievances. The sources of violence can be broadly classified as natural, social, political, commercial, and technological. The classification of the sources, their respective roots, and associated impacts are presented in Table 4.1. Each of the sources of violence …

2017 Conference Brochure: Confronting Advocacy Challenges In The Age Of Intolerance And Indifference, University Of Dayton

Human Rights Program Documents

Brochure for biennial conference that provides a space for scholars, practitioners and advocates to engage in collaboration, dialogue and critical analysis of human rights advocacy — locally and globally. The 2017 conference features:

• Research panels
• Roundtables
• Keynote addresses
• Sustainable development goals-focused plenaries

Call For Papers 2017: The Social Practice Of Human Rights, University Of Dayton

Content presented at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference

The University of Dayton Human Rights Center invites proposals from scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and advocates on a broad array of human rights topics. The Center welcomes both theoretical and applied research proposals that capture important trends in human rights scholarship and research. We encourage the submission of individual papers, complete panels, roundtables, workshops, and practitioner presentations, as well as interdisciplinary and scholar-practitioner collaborations.

To submit a paper or proposal, see the conference's section in the repository: http://ecommons.udayton.edu/human_rights/

Detaining Dialogue: Framing Treatment During The 2013 Guantánamo Hunger Strike (Abstract), Kristen Traynor

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In recent years, prisoner treatment during the “War on Terror” has re-emerged as a prominent topic in news headlines and government debate. However, the media’s framing of such treatment toward prisoners at Guantánamo Bay has received scant scholarly attention compared to that of Abu Ghraib.

With a focus on elite and media framing of treatment during the prisoner hunger strike from February to August of 2013, the goal of this paper is to explain whether government portrayal of prisoner treatment influenced the way the media framed the situation or whether the media acted with more autonomy. In the study, I …

International Organizations As Normative Agenda Setters: Social Influence And Reputational Costs In The Effects Of The International Human Rights Regime, Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz, Aldo F. Ponce

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

This paper focuses on the question of how International Organizations (IOs) influence states. In particular, we assess the role of the mechanism of social influence in shaping states’ normative (discursive) behavior, by looking at the “reporting procedure” of the Human Rights Committee (HRC) of the United Nations (UN). Our study finds that in the definition of the substantive content of their “periodic reports,” states follow the human rights agenda set by the HRC in its “concluding observations.” In this sense, we provide systematic evidence that shows that, through social influence, even poorly “legalized” IOs can have an influence over state …

Social Movements, Protest, And Human Rights: Latin America And Beyond (Abstract), James C. Franklin

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The basis of this paper is research I have conducted into protests in Latin America. By recording the demands and actors involved in protests, I have been able to assess human rights-related protests. This, in turn, allows a systematic investigation of the relationship between social movements and human rights. One principal finding is that there are two different types of human rights contention. Argentina and Guatemala experienced national human rights movements, led by human rights organizations and focused on general human rights problems and solutions.

The other countries I studied in the region (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) experienced …

Putting It On The Line: Social Justice Frameworks For Human Rights Fieldwork (Abstract), Michael Loadenthal

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Research methodology is often understood as a dry, sterile arena of IRB forms and transcription. While this is a common portrayal, things get a fair bit livelier when our field work runs amuck of extrajudicial assassinations, police infiltration and academic isolationism. Investigating social movements and individual respondents who are actively engaged in criminality presents challenging dilemmas to researchers attempting to gain respond trust while simultaneous avoid repressive State security forces. In this discussion, I will examine two venues in which this difficult navigation surfaced: ethnographically investigating Palestinian armed fighters (Nablus: 2006-2007), and interviewing clandestine Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activists (UK: …

Privacy And Freedom Of Information In Organizational Contexts: Human Rights Issues In An Era Of Big Data (Abstract), Jo Ann Oravec

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Large-scale information collection and dissemination practices are acquiring greater economic and political significance in the everyday lives of citizens. Privacy and freedom of information issues are becoming more complex as “big data” and machine learning replace traditional forms of dossier collection, statistical analysis, and archiving. This paper explores the varieties of human rights issues that are emerging. The enormous amounts of data associated with social media systems and mobile applications have increased the number of facial recognition, locational tracking, socioeconomic analysis, and related practices being conducted by corporations as well as governmental agencies.

Often corporations and governmental agencies couple their …

Human Rights In The Digital Age: Opportunities And Constraints (Abstract), Mahmood Monshipouri

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

By making information more accessible than ever before, digital technologies have come to shape societies and cultures in many respects. These technologies also offer tools for resistance and change that can be effectively deployed to influence existing power relations. People around the world have increasingly used digital media to present political reactions against authoritarian rule or to speak out against failed policies. In contrast to the all-too familiar centralized, vertically integrated social movements, theories Social Movements argue for a new way of doing politics—namely, “network politics.” More importance is attached to social and cultural concerns in these movements, and the …

De-Centering The Human: Moroccan Islamists And Human Rights (Abstract), Ahmed Khanani

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In a critical contribution to contemporary rights conversations, Blattberg argues that “human rights talk” is simply too “thin” (2009). In particular, he argues that a flaw in scholarly conversations is the move to abstraction: the human is insufficient because it is impersonal. Blattberg lodges this criticism against a host of liberal thinkers, including Nussbaum and Walzer, and contends that the move to abstraction hinders calls to justice insofar as it fails to invest actors in the plights of other people. Yet, even as Blattberg calls to personalize the people to be protected, he does not elaborate on how to flesh …

Human Rights-Based Activism: Lessons From Health Activism In South Africa And Brazil (Abstract), Kristi Heather Kenyon, Regiane Garcia

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Drawing on South Africa and Brazil’s experiences of health activism, this paper aims to provide a full illustration of how human rights-based (HRB) activism can function as an influential agency-based social determinant of health. Social determinants of health (SDH) are usually understood as circumstances and structures that disadvantage individuals by increasing their vulnerability to disease and injury. SDH are typically conceived of as conditions that act upon individuals and communities who are relatively powerless to react against the health impacts of context such as poverty and marginalization.

In addition to this ‘passive’ understanding of SDH, we put forward an ‘active’ …

Catholic Social Teaching And Economic Rights (Abstract), John Sniegocki

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has much to contribute to ongoing discussions of human rights. One important feature of CST is its holistic understanding of human rights, which includes social and economic rights along with political/civil rights. This paper will explore the understandings of economic rights and of economic democracy that are developed in the Catholic social tradition, with particular attention to the thought of Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis.

Some implications of these concepts for current realities in the United States and globally will be highlighted. Attention will also be given to critics of economic rights and economic …

Religious Freedom And The Right To Convert: Laws Against Forcible Or Induced Conversion In India (Abstract), Laura Dudley Jenkins

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In early 2015 several Hindu nationalist leaders India have called for a national law against forcible or induced conversion. Laws against “forcible conversion” have been proposed and enacted an increasing number of Indian states in recent years. Some laws include higher penalties for conversions of lower castes or women, reinforcing paternalistic assumptions that they lack the agency or ability to determine their own religion. Based on their timing, anti-conversion laws seem to be politically motivated, used to rally the Hindu majority during elections by playing on fears of their declining numbers and potential threats of mass conversions. Both proponents and …

The Potentiality Of A Digital Revolution: Alienated Activists And The Surveillance State (Abstract), Jennifer Grubbs

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The following paper will examine the ways in which digital media is used by both activists engaged in struggles of inequity as well as the State. Specifically, the paper focuses on the use of digital media in the antiracist organizing following the murders of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. Activists relied on digital media to share information, narratives, as well as create networks for mobilization. The State relied on digital media to provide counter-narratives and promulgate a fear-based rhetoric depicting activists as “looters.”

This paper emphasizes the …

Status Of Public Access To Government Information As An International Human Right (Abstract), Amin Amiri

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Freedom of information, according to which the public has a right to have access to government-held information, is largely considered as a tool for improving transparency and accountability in governments, and as a requirement of self-governance and good governance. So far, more than ninety countries have recognized citizens’ right to have access to public information. This recognition often took place through the adoption of an act referred to as “freedom of information act”, “access to public records act,” and so on.

Some steps have been taken at the national and international level towards the recognition of freedom of information as …

Turn Up The Volume: The Amplification Of Shame (Abstract), Baekkwan Park, Amanda Murdie, David Davis

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

One important strategy that HROs, and other actors, employ to call attention to human rights abuses around the world is “naming and shaming.” By calling attention to governments for their human rights violations, HROs hope to galvanize world public opinion and increase pressure on these states to halt abuses. While some HROs, like Amnesty International, communicate directly with their large membership bases, the vast majority of HROs rely on the international media to communicate their message to the international community.

Issuing reports and press releases is a major part of their strategy the international community aware of abuses The more …

Reciprocal Critique: A Dialectical Engagement Of Theology And Human Rights Discourse (Abstract), Diane Yeager

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Nicholas Wolterstorff puts the problem baldly: “The relation of Christians to human rights is a troubled relationship. It was not always so; it became so in the twentieth century.” A reviewer has accurately (if perhaps overdramatically) pointed out that “the assumption that rights talk is anathema to theology” functions as the ”chief impetus” propelling Ethna Regan’s ambitious and provocative Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights (2010).

While much of the discussion generated by Regan’s argument has centered on her efforts to show the constructive convergence of moral theology and the human rights movement (which she manages dialectically …

Double Jeopardy: The Rights Of Refugees In Marginalized Communities In The Middle East (Abstract), Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The plight of Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon was been well documented in recent years. Less attention has been paid to the impact these large refugee populations have had on the already marginalized regions in the northern (Akkar), eastern (Bakaa), and southern (Tyre & Nabatiye) parts of the country. Basic human rights such as education, health care, childhood development, family, employment, and equal protection before the law are being undermined through the ‘double burden’ of a largely unregulated and under-serviced refugee population, which is now threatening to exceed 2 million by the end of 2015.

This paper will …

To Adapt Or Not To Adapt? Accommodating Change In Humanitarian Response (Abstract), Emily K.M. Scott

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

What conditions facilitate or frustrate opportunities for adaptation during on-the-ground responses by non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? I seek to explain variation in the outcomes of adaptations by Doctors Without Borders (MSF)* during three crises: Ebola in West Africa in 2014, middle-income diseases after the Syrian Crisis, and HIV/AIDs and mental health in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This research shows that humanitarian organizations can be uniquely accommodating of uncertainty and change. In these cases political entrepreneurship by those in the field is filtered through an internal structure that deliberately accommodates debate and creative recombination of resources. Actors do not simply …

To Err Is Human Rights: Toward A Pragmatist Activism (Abstract), Geoff Dancy

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Human rights activists have often been criticized by political scientists for being “principled” rather than “pragmatic” actors. Rarely, though, is this criticism accompanied by a discussion of what pragmatism means, or what pragmatic action looks like. In this article, I conceptually trace and define three aspects of pragmatism: philosophical, methodological, and political. I then consider how these aspects of pragmatist thought can be applied in the world of human rights activism.

Among other things, I argue that pragmatic activism should remain flexible about the foundations of human rights ideals, that it should accept and even encourage local bad-mouthing of global …

Anti-Sex Trafficking Hysteria, False Narratives And The Rights Of Sex Workers (Abstract), Lonya M. Humphrey

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In 2014, a Newsweek exposé of Somaly Mam, one of Cambodia’s most highly prominent anti-sex trafficking activists, detailed how Mam fabricated her own background and experiences as a sex-trafficked Cambodian prostitute forced into sexual slavery. The Somaly Mam affair not only exposed the problematic and often hysterical victim narratives presented by the anti-trafficking communities; it also calls into question the influence those narratives have on increasingly harsh U.S. government legal initiatives directed at combatting global sex trafficking. Growing research suggest the implementation of more punitive anti-trafficking laws that focus on the rehabilitation of sex workers and the abolition of commercial …

Lights, Camera, Policy? Examining Celebrity-Driven Anti-Sex Trafficking Campaigns (Abstract), Samantha Majic

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Celebrities—persons who attract large audiences and are well known in the realm of popular culture (sports, entertainment, and fashion)—are increasingly vocal about sex trafficking. Although they often lack knowledge about or experience with the issue, they commonly testify before Congress, serve as Goodwill Ambassadors for the UN, and act in public service announcements (PSA), to name just some examples. As a result, celebrities arguably play a role in shaping related policy developments, namely by fostering particular discourses about the issue.

To explore celebrities’ engagement with sex trafficking, my paper considers a very prominent case: Demi Moore’s and Ashton Kutcher’s “Real …