Hosted by the University of Pittsburgh - September 30 through October 2, 2010
Conference Theme
Human Rights Rhetoric: Controversies, Conundrums, and Community Actions
Human rights have been asserted, recognized, reaffirmed, and
undermined around the globe. Yet what the expression, “human rights,”
designates and ought to encompass has been, and will continue to be, the
subject of international controversy. At a concrete level, “rights”
have a paradoxical quality that renders them contingent on individual,
communal, and national commitments and actions.
Rights do not exist outside of their mutual recognition by selves
and others, that is, outside of a reconciliation of individual wills in
which people freely agree to act according to obligations that they simultaneously
expect of others. Once constituted in recognition, human rights may come
to compete with other rights that make similar claims to universal status.
To take a simple example, as numerous twentieth-century public advocates
have argued, the right to freedom of speech may come into conflict with
the likewise compelling rights to security of person and equality.
There are other reasons why human rights may be the subject of controversy.
The security of any particular right requires sufficient resources for
securing its enforcement and actualization. The finitude of resources
and the (potential) lack of consensus on how to distribute them means
that disputes about which rights are “more important” are
sure to erupt. Moreover, material conditions and power arrangements can
provide substantial restraints on the rhetorical situations in which rights
are asserted. Another reason why human rights engender controversy has
to do with the term’s wide scope: in some situations, a narrower
focus may be more appropriate. On the scale of a sovereign nation governed
by law, for example, we may speak of civil or constitutional rights. A
focus on health and safety may warrant advocacy under the rubric of environmental
rights, whereas an interest in economic and social welfare may require
such rubrics as social, economic, or cultural rights. We may also note
the way in which systematic violations of the rights of members of a particular
identifiable group may occasion the establishment of rights formally tied
to group identity—e.g, ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Finally,
we could note the increasing imbrications of the human, non-human, and
artificial parts, which raise the question of whether human rights, itself,
as a concept, may reach its limit in the face of certain medical technological
developments and practices.
The fact that “human rights” is a locus of ongoing
controversy is especially evident within the history of public address
and rhetoric. We bring specific rights into focus when we talk about them;
or more specifically, when we address them before audiences or publics
willing to consider, recognize, support, enact, enforce, or undermine
and deny them. The theme of the conference invites discussion of how human
rights are addressed in political, legal, social, economic, and other
contexts. The scope of the discussion will include past, present, and
future public address concerning human rights within the United States
and internationally, considering both descriptive and critical dimensions.
Relevant questions would include how to identify a corpus of human rights
rhetoric that should be cultivated, expanded, or revised; what implications
the recent online technologies carry for the articulation, defense, or
constriction of rights; what changes globalization brings to the discourse
of rights; what pressures global economic changes put on workers’
and immigrants’ rights; recent governmental incursions into Constitutionally
protected rights in the US; the limits and possibilities of applying one
nation’s successful human rights rhetoric to another’s; the
place for articulating and defending human rights under the encroaching
pressures of corporatization; the questions raised about universality,
given differences of race, gender, ethnicity, and more; and what emerging
trends should be watched and studied by members of our scholarly community.
Contact:
Conference Director
Professor Lester Olson
Department of Communication
University of Pittsburgh
olson@pitt.edu