Bard College Catalogue 2009-2010
2009-2010

Human Rights

http://hrp.bard.edu

Faculty

Overview

Requirements

Internships and Affiliated Programs: Students are encouraged to undertake summer internships and participate in related programs off campus, including the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, Smolny College, Central European University, and the International Human Rights Exchange in South Africa.

Courses

Introduction to Human Rights
Human Rights 101
What are humans and what count as rights? Students consider the foundations of rights claims; legal and violent ways of advancing, defending, and enforcing rights; documents and institutions of the human rights movement; and the questionable reality of human rights in our world. Readings are drawn from Hannah Arendt, Nuruddin Farah, Michael Ignatieff, Kant, David Rieff, and Rousseau, as well as Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Terror, Torture, and Truth: Human Rights after 9/11
Human Rights 203
After 9/11, Americans would “take the gloves off” in their treatment of prisoners, their policies on interrogation, and their attitude toward the laws of war. This course examines these policy changes closely, as well as the decisions government officials made, the documents they wrote to advance those policies, and the actions of those who carried those policies out in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo.

The Great Dictators
Human Rights 210
By the end of the 20th century, many dictators had been deposed, had stepped down, or died: Chairman Mao, the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Emperor Bokassa, General Pinochet, and more. New ones have been slow to emerge. This seminar investigates whether these are the last of the great dictators or whether others will reemerge, and if so, in what form.

Free Speech
Human Rights 218 / Literature 218
This course explores the intersection of literature and human rights, from the Greeks to hate speech on the Internet. What is freedom of speech? Where did it come from? What does it have to do with literature? These questions are examined across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal, and political texts.

Perspectives in LGBT Studies
Human Rights 221
cross-listed: gss
An introduction to the core issues that have shaped the widening field of sexuality studies. The course is organized into a series of units, each devoted to one perspective in the study of sexuality and gender: the history of (homo)sexuality, homosexuality and the law, homosexuality in other cultures, sexuality and race, transgender studies, and AIDS.

Dissent and Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe
Human Rights 227
cross-listed: gis
Václev Havel, in “The Power of the Powerless,” defined Eastern European dissidents as those who “live in truth.” Reading works by prominent dissidents, including Havel, Jan Patoˇcka, Andrei Sakharov, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Czeslav Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, and Miclós Haraszti, students consider the strategies of resistance against totalitarian systems in former Soviet bloc countries, mechanisms of political identification, the role of intellectuals and writers, and underground publishing.

Dreaming Utopia: The Theory and Practice of Ideal Worlds
Human Rights 230
This class addresses landmark works in the history of utopia and dystopia, including writings by More, Owen, Fourier, Marx, Bellamy, Welles, London, and Orwell; and examines the provocative and sometimes catastrophic embodiment of the utopian ideal in the “real world,” from the Oneida Community and Jonestown to the Soviet Gulags and the New Caliphate of the Islamists.

Problems in Human Rights
Human Rights 233 / Anthropology 233
This course looks at current issues such as slavery, genocide, body modification, and the rights of children and animals, and examines how human rights researchers deal with practical difficulties and ethical challenges posed by other cultures.

Dignity and Human Rights Traditions: A New Law on Earth
Human Rights 235
cross-listed: political studies
Lawyers in Germany and South Africa are developing a “dignity jurisprudence” that might guarantee human rights on the foundation of human dignity. Is it possible to develop a secular and legal idea of dignity that can offer grounds for human rights?

Religion and Democracy
Human Rights 237
cross-listed: gis, religion
Students investigate the impact on European democracies of Muslim immigration, the influence of the religious right in the United States, and the ways traditionally polytheistic societies, like China and Japan, have dealt with religion. The approach is historical as well as cultural, giving students different perspectives on how to tame the aggressive potential in religious and utopian dreams. Readings include de Tocqueville on democracy in America, Olivier Roy on European Islam, Levinson on Confucianism in China, and such literary works as Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.

Justice after Dictatorship
Human Rights 238
cross-listed: asian studies
This course examines the various ways of cleaning up the mess after dictatorships have fallen. These include war crimes tribunals, truth commissions, and the political use of personal files. Students look at the effect tribunals have had on democratic transitions, especially in Germany and Japan after World War II. Readings include Lawrence Weschler’s A Miracle, a Universe; Telford Taylor’s The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials; Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt, and John Dower’s Embracing Defeat.

Observation and Description
Human Rights 240
The observation and description of reality is a fundamental problem for human rights. Pain, violence, victimization, and injustice have long been a part of human reality. This seminar attempts to get at perception before it has been shaped as expression. Through examples and assignments, students investigate how nonprofessionals can use current technologies and new visual attitudes to make human rights reporting visually and emotionally engaging to the largest possible audience.

Human, All-Too-Human Rights
Human Rights 257
This course starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s suspicion that compassion for the suffering and talk of equality harbored a project not to promote life, but to destroy it. To help extend what we learn from Nietzsche to the contemporary scene, students read selections from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and ask a variant of Nietzsche’s question: What is the value of human rights?

Memories of Political Violence and Repression
Human Rights 305
cross-listed: lais, political studies
This course examines how societal actors, in different historical, cultural, and national settings and scenarios, construct meanings and narratives of their past political violence and intergroup conflicts. It sets the cultural and symbolic construction of diverse meanings and subjective understandings in the context of quests for justice, truth, and institutional changes in postdictatorial periods.

Humanitarian Action
Human Rights 314
cross-listed: gis
This seminar explores humanitarian action from the founding of the Red Cross in 1863 to the contemporary explosion of nongovernmental relief organizations. Central categories in humanitarian discourse—neutrality, emergency, testimony, and refugee—are addressed, with particular attention to recent crises in Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Darfur, among others.

New Orleans after the Disaster
Human Rights 320
A yearlong seminar that focuses on some of the issues raised by the destruction of New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Taught by a rotating group of expert visiting faculty, the course examines the transitional city and rebuilding efforts through the lenses of human rights and urbanism. The course includes a January intersession in New Orleans, during which students engage these questions directly as research assistants to community organizations and/or government projects.

Roguery, Debauchery, and War: A Thieves’ Journey through the Picaresque
Human Rights 325
The modern novel was spawned in thievery and disrepute: rogues spinning tall tales, hapless heroes conniving their way through violent, war-torn landscapes as they contrived preposterous adventures. The class traces these tales back to their start on the 16th-century Iberian peninsula, follows their spread through Europe, and looks at the picaresque today. Readings include works by Petronius, Cervantes, Defoe, Grass, Bellow, and Kosinski, among others.

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: New Orleans After
Human Rights 326
An advanced seminar in critical urban theory that begins with the Bard–New Orleans Initiative as an exploration of the ongoing reconstruction of New Orleans. The course considers questions of urban citizenship, spatial justice, and the contested meaning and direction of the NOLA recovery, while also situating New Orleans in a system of cities and city-regions, and in relation to increasingly global flows of people, ideas, capital, and commodities.

Cosmopolitanism to Globalization: World Citizen from Kant to Amin
Human Rights 329
In “Perpetual Peace,” Immanuel Kant laid out his vision of a world community governed by a single global authority and inhabited by “citizens of the world.” This course explores how ideas of cosmopolitanism developed, from the late Enlightenment through recent debates. Readings range from Kant, Lessing, and Goldsmith to Samir Amin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and other contemporary theorists.

Bhopal
Human Rights 410
cross-listed: film and electronic arts
This intensive seminar uses the Bhopal disaster (a gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in India in December 1984, which killed 8,000 and permanently injured tens of thousands more) as a case study in human rights research.