Catalogue

Human Rights

humanrights.bard.edu

Faculty

Thomas Keenan (director), Ziad Abu-Rish, Ingrid Becker, Roger Berkowitz, Ian Buruma, Nicole Caso, Christian Ayne Crouch, Mark Danner, Tania El Khoury, Omar G. Encarnación, Helen Epstein, Jeannette Estruth, Tabetha Ewing, Nuruddin Farah, Kwame Holmes, Laura Kunreuther, Susan Merriam, Alys Moody, Gregory B. Moynahan, Michelle Murray, Gilles Peress, Dina Ramadan, Miles Rodriguez, Peter Rosenblum, John Ryle, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Nathan Thrall, Éric Trudel, Obianujo Catherine Udeh, Robert Weston, Ruth Zisman

Overview

Human Rights is an interdisciplinary program spanning the arts, natural and social sciences, and languages and literature. Human Rights courses explore fundamental conceptual questions, historical and empirical issues within the disciplines, and practical and legal strategies of human rights advocacy. Students are encouraged to approach human rights in a spirit of open inquiry, challenge orthodoxies, confront ideas with reality and vice versa, and think critically about human rights as a field of knowledge rather than merely training for it as a profession. 

Requirements

Human Rights students must anchor their studies of human rights in a disciplinary focus program of their choice (e.g., anthropology, biology, art, history, etc.). Prior to or concurrent with Moderation, students are required to take at least three human rights core courses, one additional course in human rights, and two courses in the disciplinary focus program. Following Moderation, students take at least three additional 4-credit courses in human rights, at least one of these at the 300 level; the junior research seminar (Human Rights 303); and two further courses, including one at the 300 level in the disciplinary focus program. The final requirement is completion of a Senior Project related to human rights. 

Recent Senior Projects in Human Rights

• “A FINE LINE: On Supporting People in Prison by Recognizing Correctional Officers as Stakeholders in Criminal Justice Reform Initiatives”
• “Neither Dead nor Alive: Lebanon’s Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons”
• “Thinking of Doggerland: Experiments in Climate Fiction and Narratives of Human Rights”

Internships and Affiliated Programs

Students are encouraged to undertake summer internships and participate in programs off campus, including study-away opportunities at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program and partner universities in the Open Society University Network.

Courses

Core courses include Human Rights 101 , Introduction to Human Rights; Human Rights 105, Human Rights Advocacy; Human Rights 120, Human Rights Law and Practice; Human Rights 213, Gay Rights, Human Rights; Human Rights 226, Women’s Rights, Human Rights; Human Rights 234, ( Un)Defining the Human; Human Rights 235, Dignity and the Human Rights Tradition; Human Rights 240, Observation and Description; Human Rights 2509, Telling Stories about Rights; and Human Rights 257, Human Rights and the Economy. Core courses offered through other fields of study include Anthropology/GIS 224, A Lexicon of Migration; Anthropology 261, Anthropology of Violence and Suffering; History 2356, American Indian History; History 2631, Capitalism and Slavery; Literature 218, Free Speech; Politics 245, Human Rights in Global Politics; and Spanish 240, Testimonies of Latin America.

Introduction to Human Rights
Human Rights 101
What are humans and what are 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.

Race, Health, and Inequality: A Global Perspective
Human Rights 104
CROSS-LISTED: GIS
DESIGNATED: DASI AND RJI COURSE
The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the systemic health and social inequities that put racial minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from disease. This course explores the causes and consequences of racial and ethnic health inequities, and examines how different countries have responded to these inequities. Also considered; how racism, colonialism, and
globalization have impacted the health of incarcerated populations and various immigrant groups, and how community-based activism and social movements could move countries closer to health equity.

Human Rights Advocacy
Human Rights 105
CROSS-LISTED: GIS
DESIGNATED: ELAS AND MIGRATION INITIATIVE COURSE
Half of the course focuses on the history and theory of human rights advocacy—What is it to make claims for human rights, or to denounce their violation, especially on behalf of others? How, when, and why have individuals and groups spoken out, mounted campaigns, published exposés?—and half involves hands-on work with Scholars at Risk. The class researches specific events and individuals, communicates with families and advocates, writes country and case profiles, proposes strategies for pressuring governments and other actors, and develops appeals to public opinion.

Human Rights Law and Practice
Human Rights 120
This is a core course on the origin, evolution, and contemporary state of human rights law and practice. The first half explores the rise of international human rights law and the transnational human rights movement. The second half is devoted to case studies in contemporary human rights, focusing on issues of migration, criminal justice, labor, health care, and inequality. Authors include Louis Henkin, Samuel Moyn, Lynn Hunt, and Kathryn Sikkink. Case studies are prepared from contemporary materials from courts, activists, and critics.

Human Rights to Civil Rights
Human Rights 189
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN AND INIGENOUS STUDIES, HISTORICAL STUDIES
DESIGNED: DASI, ELAS, AND HSI COURSE
For much of the 20th century, civil rights and human rights advocates worked hand in hand against a shared target: state actors and global systems that exploited human bodies and denied human dignity in the name of prejudice, nationalism, and profit. Yet in the 1960s, a new wave of social movements representing Black, feminist, LGBTQ, Chicano, Indigenous, and disabled perspectives pushed against notions of universal human rights. Students read foundational writings of identity-based movement leaders, with an eye to their applicability to contemporary struggles over immigration, mass incarceration, and police violence.  

Gay Rights, Human Rights
Human Rights 213
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
An in-depth survey of historical and contemporary struggles for LGBT rights, including the right to association, repeal of antisodomy statutes, privacy rights, equal protection, military service, employment discrimination, same-sex marriage, adoption rights, and transgender rights around restroom access and incarceration. The course focuses on LGBT rights in the United States, but broader contexts in American history and international human rights law are also considered.

Free Speech
Human Rights 218
What is “freedom of speech”? Is there a right to say anything? Why? This course investigates who has had this right, where it came from, and what it has to do with literature and the arts. Debates about censorship, hate speech, the First Amendment, and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are starting points, but less obvious questions—about surveillance, faith and the secular, confession and torture—are also explored. Taught in parallel with classes at Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard, and the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. Many assignments and activities are shared, and the class works jointly on some material with students at other schools.

Mapping Police Violence
Human Rights 219
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
DESIGNATED: ELAS COURSE
Questions addressed include: What can we know about police violence, and what are the barriers to data transparency and distribution? What are the political, legal, economic, and cultural means through which Western societies authorize the use of deadly force? Can we measure the impact of police violence on factors like public health indices, property values, educational opportunities, and the distribution of social services? In pursuit of answers, the course engages political theory, history, sociology, economics, and cultural studies.

Queer Subjects of Desire
Human Rights 221
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
Over the past two decades, debates between proponents of gay and lesbian studies and proponents of queer theory have led to a rich array of subfields in gender and sexuality research. This course addresses some of the issues that have shaped the widening field of sexuality studies. Topics discussed may include essentialism vs. constructivism, gay historiography, transhistorical and transcultural patterns of same-sex desire, (homo)sexuality and race, (homo)sexuality and terrorism, and the homoerotics of war.

Epidemics and Society
Human Rights 223
CROSS-LISTED: ANTHROPOLOGY, BIOLOGY, GIS, GSS, PSYCHOLOGY
DESIGNATED: OSUN COURSE
Epidemiologists investigate patterns in the spread of diseases, predict when and where outbreaks will occur, and identify who is most at risk. Modern epidemiology emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries when populations in the United States and Europe encountered a spate of new diseases including cholera, typhus, lung cancer, and lead poisoning. This course investigates how the spread of many diseases is governed by social, political, and economic forces; and how epidemics have been addressed throughout history.

Women’s Rights, Human Rights
Human Rights 226
CROSS-LISTED: GIS
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
Following an overview of first-wave feminism, this course engages students with second-wave feminism, including the critical appropriations and contestations of Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis that were characteristic of post-1968 feminist theory; poststructuralist theories of sexual difference; écriture féminine; ’70s debates surrounding the NOW and ERA movements; and issues of race and class at the center of third-wave feminism..

(Un)Defining the Human
Human Rights 234 
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
At least since Aristotle, philosophers have sought to delineate the contours of the human. To define what it means to be human is at once to exclude those modes of being deemed to be not human—a process of exclusion that produces various categories of otherness: thing, animal, savage, slave, other, foreigner, stranger, cyborg, alien. Students engage with a range of theoretical discussions that attempt to situate the human being vis-à-vis its varying “others.”

Dignity and Human Rights Traditions: A New Law on Earth
Human Rights 235
CROSS-LISTED: POLITICS
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
We live at a time when the claim to human rights is both taken for granted and regularly disregarded. One reason for the disconnect is that human rights have never been given a secure philosophical foundation. This course explores both the modern challenge to dignity and human rights, the historical foundations of human rights, and modern attempts to develop a new and more coherent secular ideal of dignity as a legally valid guarantee of human rights. 

Observation and Description
Human Rights 240
The observation and description of reality is a fundamental problem for human rights. The process of trying to understand what we see, how we see it, and how we describe it brings us closer to a resolution. This seminar sets out to reappropriate reality, to see images in the heart and eye before they harden as categories, styles, and definitions.

Constitutional Law: Theory and Comparative Practice
Human Rights 243 / Politics 243
See Politics 243 for a full course description.

Humanism and Antihumanism in 20th-Century French Thought
Human Rights 245
CROSS-LISTED: FRENCH STUDIES
What is the legacy of humanism in 20th-century French thought? The belief in its values was once so strong that humanism came to be equated with republicanism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. And yet the humanists’ affirmation of the centrality of man came under attack throughout the century, under the influence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, ultimately to be denounced as nothing more than a construct of “petit bourgeois” ideology. This course surveys the ongoing and contentious debate.

Can We Retire from Race?
Human Rights 249
In 2012 the conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper famously “retired" from being Black. This 2-credit workshop takes its inspiration from Piper’s provocative gesture and growing skepticism about racial categorization. It aims to challenge students’ thinking about the racialized identities we inhabit/inherit and concerns itself with two questions: to what extent do we create ourselves and to what extent are our identities passively received? Authors may include Piper, Paul Gilroy, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Telling Stories about Rights
Human Rights 2509 / Literature 2509
See Literature 2509 for a course description.

Abolishing Prisons and the Police 
Human Rights 253
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, HISTORICAL STUDIES
DESIGNATED: ELAS AND HSI COURSE
This course explores what’s to be gained and lost in a world without prisons. Through the lens of abolition (addressed via movements to end slavery, the death penalty, abortion, and gay conversion therapy), students examine how and why groups of Americans have sought to bring an end to sources of human suffering. Also addressed: a history of the punitive impulse in American social policy and, on the specific question of prison abolition, how to “sell” abolition to the masses and design a multimedia ad campaign to make prison abolition go viral.

Sanctuary: Engaging State and Local Government for Human Rights
Human Rights 255
CROSS-LISTED: POLITICS
DESIGNATED: HSI AND MIGRATION INITIATIVE COURSE
The rise of “sanctuary cities” has pitted the federal government against states and localities in the enforcement of immigration law. The battles ignite questions about federalism that have persisted since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution: while federal law is “supreme” in the Constitution, states remain “sovereign.” This course explores the history and legal underpinnings of local government engagement for human rights; the second half focuses on the current struggle over immigration law enforcement. Readings include historical materials, Supreme Court cases, and case studies of sanctuary towns and cities. 

Human Rights and the Economy
Human Rights 257
This course explores the history of “economic and social rights” before looking at efforts to bring human rights considerations into the project of development and use human rights in battles with investors and global corporations. Texts include works by Amartya Sen, Philip Alston, Peter Uvin, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Collier, William Easterly, Abhijit Banerjee, and Esther Duflo; and case studies of activist engagements with Nike, Shell Oil, the World Bank, and others. Also considered is the United Nations’ engagement with business and human rights.

How to Change the World: Theories and Practices
Human Rights 258
Whether we are campaigning for civil rights, environmental justice, refugee rights, or LGBTQIA and women’s rights, a prerequisite to success is a theory of social change that guides the methods employed. Protest tactics are plentiful, from direct action in the streets to ballot initiative, but if the theory of change underlying the activism is false, then protests are bound to fail. This course looks at four theories of change—voluntarism, structuralism, subjectivism, and theurgism—through case studies from ancient Greece to the modern world.

Epidemiology of Childhood
Human Rights 261
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, GIS, GPH, GSS
DESIGNATED: ELAS AND HSI COURSE
This course covers efforts past and present by governments, health agencies, and foundations to promote the health of children around the world. The course begins with efforts led by UNICEF to save children in poor countries from the scourges of pneumonia, malaria, and other diseases of poverty, and then examines how American public health officials reduced the toll from these same diseases during the early 20th century using very different methods. The new challenges facing children today are also discussed.

Law of Police
Human Rights 264
CROSS-LISTED: SOCIOLOGY
DESIGNATED: RJI COURSE
Recent events have challenged the role of police, highlighting persistent problems of abuse, particularly against African Americans. At the same time, the movement to reform the police faces powerful countervailing political, economic, and legal forces. Law defines the power of the police and its limits, but critics of the left and right show how the law fails to account for the reality or cover the full range of a police action. This course explores laws that have empowered police, those that have attempted to limit them, and the limits of the law itself. 

Public Health in Action
Human Rights 266
CROSS-LISTED: GPH
Public health programs and practitioners operate at the nexus of civil society, politics, humanitarian emergencies, and other crises to ensure that programs reach the right people in the right place(s) at the right time(s). Such programming requires coordination at local, regional, and national levels. Guest speakers discuss their experiences in leading responses to epidemics like AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19. They may include representatives from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, and health ministries in Namibia, Haiti, Vietnam, and other nations (via Zoom).

Human Rights and Decolonization
Human Rights 267
CROSS-LISTED: GIS, LITERATURE
The “period of decolonization”—the decades after World War II, in which many former colonies achieved independence from European colonial powers—coincides with the rise of the contemporary regime of human rights. The course asks how this shared history shaped the development of both human rights and decolonization, and what this means for the way these two concepts function today. It ranges from historical events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference, which brought together decolonial thinkers from across Africa and Asia, to contemporary movements such as Rhodes Must Fall. 

Visual Storytelling for Civic Engagement
Human Rights 268
DESIGNATED: OSUN COURSE
This course explores the use of video for civic engagement and development projects, and trains students in the basics of smartphone-based documentary film techniques. Built around a series of case studies, the class considers theoretical readings on the use of media in social movements as well as practical aspects of documentary film technique, and culminates in a team documentary project. The course is open to OSUN students across four campuses (Annandale, Berlin, East Jerusalem, Bishkek). All required gear and software provided.

Slavery, Reconciliation, and Repair
Human Rights 269
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, HISTORICAL STUDIES
Ulster county has announced its interest in creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the “ongoing present” of slavery in the community. Students participate in the county’s efforts by researching historic and recent efforts by state actors to hold themselves accountable for past wrongs. They also receive training in genealogical research, as the commission works to locate the descendants of enslaved people in Ulster County. Ultimately, the class will make recommendations to the commission.

Comparative Settler Colonialism
Human Rights 271
CROSS-LISTED: GIS, POLITICS
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
The course begins with a conceptual and theoretical distinction between “settler colonialism” (e.g., the United States, South Africa, Algeria) and “metropole colonialism” (e.g., British India, French Morocco). The second part explores specific case studies, likely drawn from Algeria, Australia, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, and the United States. The final part attends to the ways in which international law and human rights have facilitated and/or challenged settler colonialism as colonial practice or state structure. 

(Trans)formations: Introduction to Transgender Studies
Human Rights 272
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
This course provides students with the opportunity to examine critically, and in depth, multiple facets of transgender existence. Topics include transgender history, the history of trans medicine, and the economics and politics of access—to treatment, bathrooms and other gender-segregated spaces, and more generally, to housing, jobs, benefits, sports, and military service. Students read transgender autobiography and trans fiction as well as works that provide historical context and theoretical grounding. 

Research in Human Rights
Human Rights 303
What does it mean to do research in human rights? What are the relevant methods and tools? How do political and ethical considerations enter into the conduct of research? The seminar explores a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the field, with readings from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives.

Food, Labor, and Human Rights
Human Rights 311
This seminar looks at domestic and international efforts to regulate and improve the conditions of workers who produce food. The class first studies the history of agricultural labor, the role of plantation economies, and contemporary analyses of the relationship between labor and the economics of food production. It then considers private and public mechanisms to improve conditions, including social-certification programs and fair trade. Case studies include migrant workers in the Hudson Valley, tomato pickers in Florida, and tea plantations in India.

Evidence
Human Rights 3206
Evidence would seem to be a matter of facts, far from the realm of literary or artistic invention. But, whether as fact or fiction, we are regularly confronted by all sorts of signs and we need to learn how to read the traces of things left behind. This seminar explores the theory and practice of evidence, with special attention paid to the different forms evidence can take and the disputes to which it can give rise, especially when violations of, and claims for, human rights are at stake.

Advocacy Video: Clemency
Human Rights 321
CROSS-LISTED: FILM AND ELECTRONIC ARTS
DESIGNATED: ELAS COURSE
State governors (and the president) possess a strange remnant of royal sovereignty: the power of executive clemency, by which they can pardon offenses or commute criminal sentences. Clemency doesn’t just happen—it requires a lot of work on the part of the incarcerated person and his or her advocates. Participants in this seminar join forces with a team of students at CUNY School of Law and the human rights organization WITNESS to prepare short video presentations to accompany a number of New York State clemency applications. Proficiency with video shooting, editing, and an independent work ethic are important.

Human Rights in the Global Economy
Human Rights 338
CROSS-LISTED: ECONOMICS, GIS, GPH
The transformation of the global economy since the end of the Cold War—including the increased importance of transnational trade, investment, and global corporations—forced human rights advocates to rethink their focus on the state. This course explores the history of the global corporation in relation to the rights of workers and citizens in the societies where they operate (case studies include the British East India Company, United Fruit Company, and the South African divestment campaign), as well as the rise of economic activism.

Photography and Human Rights
Human Rights 343
CROSS-LISTED: PHOTOGRAPHY
Human rights today is unthinkable apart from photography. Without photography—the vector by which NGOs generate knowledge, evidence, and funding, based on a sense of empathy and urgency—there would probably be fewer human rights and no humanitarian movement. Starting with historical accounts by Lynn Hunt and others, the class explores the ways in which visual appeals have played a defining role in the establishment of human rights, both as consciousness and as constitutional and international law.

Reproductive Health and Human Rights
Human Rights 354 
CROSS-LISTED: GIS, GPH, GSS
Centuries ago, a shift in attitudes and norms concerning sexual, reproductive, and family life began spreading from one society to another. Scholars call it the Demographic Transition, narrowly defined as a progressive reduction in the size of families and an increase in the survival of children. Causes and consequences have included political turmoil, intellectual and artistic movements, the spread of diseases like syphilis and AIDS, and new ideas about self and identity. This course explores policy and movements related to population growth, contraception, sex trafficking, abortion, and related issues.

LGBTQ+ Issues in U.S. Education
Human Rights 358
CROSS-LISTED: GSS
An overview of both the history and contemporary landscape of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and related (LGBTQ+) issues in U.S. education. Students explore the legal, political, pedagogical, and empirical questions that have been central to this field over the last three decades, such as: What are the rights of LGBTQ+ students and educators, and what are the obstacles to their being realized? What do LGBTQ+ supportive school environments look like, and what does research tell us about their effectiveness?

Losing Freedom
Human Rights 369
CROSS-LISTED: LITERATURE
Though the subject may seem terrifyingly new to the average American, the collapse of republican or democratic government into tyranny has been a preoccupation of literature since democracy and literature began. The course presents central texts in this history, fiction and nonfiction alike, including writings by Plato, Robert Graves, Henry Adams, Sinclair Lewis, Tim Snyder, and others. Using these texts and examples drawn from the contemporary politics of Hungary, Russia, and the United States, the class focuses on the way democracies collapse—slowly, and then suddenly.   

International Law, Human Rights, and the Question of Violence
Human Rights 370  
This seminar explores the historical and contemporary intersections between international law, human rights, and violence. Of particular interest are the ways in which the development of international law and human rights relate to broader global dynamics, such as imperialism and de-colonization. Students consider how the human rights regime and broader system of international law relate to specific forms of violence, and engage contemporary debates about redefining/reforming international law and/or human rights as well as the institutional arrangements to produce and enforce them. 

Disability Rights, Chronic Life
Human Rights 372
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ARCHITECTURE, PHILOSOPHY
DESIGNATED: DASI COURSE
This seminar engages with disability studies, queer theory, architectural and design history, political ecology, and histories of radical organizing and mobilization that focus on the idea and experience of disability and sickness. In traversing these materials, the course asks: rather than seeing disability and sickness as a limitation or failure to reach a “healthy” norm, what can the experience of the disabled and chronically ill, as well as those who fight for their care, reveal about social structures, ideologies, and patterns of circulation that cannot be seen otherwise? 

Beyond Colonial Distinctions: Concerning Human-Nonhuman Allyship
Human Rights 374
CROSS-LISTED: ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
How might historically dehumanized communities stand in allyship with the nonhuman without experiencing further dehumanization? This course attempts to grapple with the highly contentious meeting points between human rights, racialization, and nonhuman rights. Through readings from Black feminist, decolonial, queer theory, and Native studies authors, as well as speculative authors, artists, and activist collectives, students explore the newest and oldest forms of allyship: interspecies solidarity.

Queer Ecopoetics: Sentience, Aesthetics, and Blackness
Human Rights 375
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY, GSS
This interdisciplinary seminar draws on fields of visual culture, Black studies, science fiction, cultural studies, queer and feminist theory, environmental justice, and artistic ecological interventionist work. It aims to equip students with a critical praxis toward curating/producing work that engages race, gender, colonialism, class, and disability justice in the face of drastic environmental change and its reverberations across the cultural sector. The course covers concepts from across visual arts, performance, film, ecological policy, curatorial theory, ecopoetics, climate justice, cyberpunk, and more. 

Housing Justice
Human Rights 376 
In the “study” portion of this course, students read legal and cultural studies of “property” and “property rights,” as well as the history of public and fair housing policy. In the “practice” portion, they examine how housing inequity manifests in Kingston, New York, and other areas of Ulster County. In collaboration with Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, the class tracks post–COVID moratorium eviction proceedings and monitors Kingston’s investigation into a series of fires that have functionally evicted low-income tenants from multiunit buildings poised for sale. 

World War II in the Cinema
Human Rights 377
CROSS-LISTED: FILM AND ELECTRONIC ARTS
The purpose of this course is to show views of the same war from different sides. Screenings of films made during World War II in Britain, the United States, France, Germany, China, and Japan give an idea of the different ideologies and methods of propaganda as well as an impression of what life was like in the various countries. Also discussed: films made after the war that show how countries have (or have not) come to terms with their past and the Holocaust. 

Exhibiting (Im)mobility: Art, Museums, Migration
Human Rights 379
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY AND VISUAL CULTURE, MES
DESIGNATED: MIGRATIONAL INITIATIVE COURSE
Can artists and museums respond to the refugee crisis? This century has witnessed the prevalence of the refugee, the migrant, the stateless, and the politically displaced—categories produced by global capitalism’s uneven distribution of resources. The course considers how exhibitions and artistic projects have sought to integrate the refugee into the space of the museum and examines the possibilities and limitations of art to generate empathy and even solidarity. A collaboration between students at Bard and Middlebury College. 

The Study of Hate: Antisemitism, Holocaust, Colonialism, Gender: Connecting the Conversations
Human Rights 385
DESIGNATED: HSI AND OSUN NETWORK COLLABORATION COURSE
An interdisciplinary examination of human hatred and how to understand it. Many academic fields, such as social psychology, anthropology, sociology, religion, history, and law, offer important windows to our understanding of hate and the human condition. This course is designed to pull together strands from these diverse disciplines, in order to present a cohesive examination of hate, perhaps even offering a view of hate as a system. 

The Crime of Indifference
Human Rights 386
DESIGNATED: MIGRATION INITIATIVE COURSE
The 1990s Balkan conflicts represent a tipping point in international justice. The global response emphasized either historical hatreds and the legacy of blood, and therefore the futility of intervention, or the urgency and assumed efficacy of intervention to stop crimes against humanity and genocide. This course goes beyond this shallow choice. It also explores the crime of indifference in national and international law. Readings from historical, journalistic, and eyewitness accounts of the wars in the former Yugoslavia; reports by human rights organizations and activists; film and photographic accounts of events; and proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal.

Documenting Voter Suppression and Exclusion
Human Rights 387
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
This course facilitates the creation of a video archive that documents voter suppression and exclusion. The archive will be made available to legislators for use in congressional hearings supporting voting rights legislation. To develop an informed context for conducting interviews with Black voting rights stakeholders who benefited from the Voting Rights Act (of 1965), as well as multigenerational stakeholders whose access to voting has been adversely impacted by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the class surveys the history of voting rights and voting suppression from Reconstruction to today. Students conduct interviews via Zoom and edit this material using iMovie or Final Cut. 

The Death Penalty in the United States: Draconian or Necessary?
Human Rights 388
The course reviews the complex history of the death penalty in the United States, from colonial times through the present, with an overview of the social and legal justifications for capital punishment. Topics discussed include the legal procedures involved in the death penalty, from charging through execution; historical and contemporary controversies surrounding the administration of the death penalty; and the death penalty in an international context. Sources include films, judicial opinions, legal scholarship, news accounts, and death row autobiographies.

Disability Art and Aesthetics: Extra Visuality and Nonlocality
Human Rights 390
How are “images” produced beyond the notion of sightedness? How might we deform social spaces that continually segregate audiences along an axis of dis/ability? What might incapacity and nonlocality offer art and artworks in dislodging the specificity of both site and sight? This course surveys the field of cultural production and art historical works that have resisted the forms and primacy of ocularcentrism, while seeking to elaborate strategies in accessibility for all audiences.