Problem-based learning beyond borders: Impact and potential for university-level human rights education

Abstract

This article outlines a cutting-edge pedagogy I have branded problem-based learning beyond borders, which I have employed in a wide variety of human rights courses and in developing curriculum for two graduate programs in human rights. It involves engaging students, faculty, and community members in real-world problems usually raised by the community members. This pedagogy could be employed successfully in a range of human rights courses and programs but faculty members are often reluctant to adopt a new pedagogy, especially when it involves shifting their pedagogical ethos. So here I offer a number of compelling examples of this pedagogy drawn from my human rights classes, and then I turn to the question of best practices for encouraging other human rights faculty members to adopt such cutting-edge active-learning pedagogies. I end with some practical advice that should be applicable when encouraging faculty to experiment with such innovative pedagogies.     

Social pressure, surveillance and community size: Evidence from field experiments on voter turnout

Citizens participate in elections, at least partly, because they perceive voting as a social norm. Norms induce compliance because individuals prefer to avoid enforcement mechanisms—including social sanctions—that can be activated by uncooperative behavior. Public visibility, or surveillance, increases the likelihood of norm-compliant behavior and applies social pressure that impels individuals to act. Some scholars have linked social pressure to community size, advancing the notion that pressure to conform to social norms is heightened in smaller, less populous communities in which citizens interact frequently and where monitoring behavior is less onerous. Others argue that even highly-populated communities can exhibit “small world” properties that cause residents to be sensitive to social pressure. In this paper, I analyze data from a recent field experiment designed to test the impact of social pressure on voting taking interactions with community size into account. The findings I report suggest community size does not moderate the impact of social pressure.     

Repairing Civil Society and Experimenting with Power: A Genealogy of Social Capital

In this article my principal aims are to explain why the concept of social capital has proven so popular among policy makers and to develop a critical response to it. In order to do so I bring together macro- and micro-level analyses that focus, on the one hand, on broad structural changes associated with globalisation and, on the other, on specific attempts at increasing social capital within the everyday lives of communities. To develop my macro-level analysis I suggest that the conjunction of economic volatility and demographic mobility that has affected the West since the 1970s has made building social capital an attractive option within a more general experiment with new forms of power. My claim here is that building social capital is among a clutch of recent policy initiatives designed to repair the ideological resources of contemporary liberal states, where it is the tearing as well as the weakening of the social fabric that is at stake. I focus on the British case because building social capital has been explicitly highlighted by the UK government as a vehicle for civic renewal. The micro-analysis proceeds by analysing recent surveys and policies undertaken by Camden Council. Micro refers here to local symptoms of global change; to the micro-powers being developed in response and to the local authorities where social capital policies are being operationalised. I associate these with biopolitical and ideological interventions into the very building blocks of the social. Overall, the genealogy of social capital explores how the concept's discursive significance has shifted as it moves from the democratisation literature into the policy arena and becomes entangled in relations of power. In the latter context it examines the impact of concerns about segregation that justify intrusive policies associated with social capital building.     

Sketches for a Democratic Utopia

I want to sketch the general shape of several new structures that would in my view provide stronger support for democracy than is provided by any existing society. I call these sketches for a democratic Utopia not because I would expect these structures to inaugurate a perfect democracy, whatever that might be, nor because they are beyond human reach. On the contrary the institutions I want to suggest are well within human reach. I call them Utopian only because I am not able to point with confidence to the historical forces that are likely to bring them about.
The structures I have in mind are designed to strengthen freedom and equality among citizens of democratic orders.     

Do Animals Have an Interest in Liberty?

Proponents of justice for animals often argue that non-human animals have an interest in liberty. Furthermore, they usually claim that this animal interest in liberty is intrinsic rather than instrumental; that is to say, liberty is regarded to be good for animals in itself, irrespective of its contribution to the achievement of other goods, such as pleasure. For this reason they argue that legislating to improve welfare standards in zoos, circuses, laboratories and agriculture is inadequate. Instead, they claim that such practices are analogous to human slavery, necessarily harmful and must be abolished. In this article I refute this assertion and claim that for most animals, their interest in liberty can only ever be instrumental. In doing so I outline and reject two different arguments in favour of an intrinsic animal interest in liberty: first, that liberty is an intrinsic interest of animals because they possess preference autonomy; and second, that it is good for animals to be free, where freedom is defined as the ability to exercise one's natural functionings. I conclude that most animals do not possess an intrinsic interest in liberty because they are not autonomous in the relevant sense; that is, they cannot frame, revise and pursue their own conception of the good. If my conclusion is correct, this would have important effects on our obligations to non-human animals. I end the article by introducing some of these possible implications. Specifically, I propose that for most animals, our obligations do not consist of liberating them, and that it might be permissible to use and interfere with animals more often than other proponents of justice for animals have suggested. If this is the case, not all of the ways we keep and use animals need to be abolished. Nevertheless, many need to be reformed to improve welfare standards.     

Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be “theory from above.” This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.     

Resource disparity and multi-level elections in competitive authoritarian regimes: Regression discontinuity evidence from Hong Kong

Much research has been done to study how competitive elections affect autocracies and their opposition. Electoral institutions, however, may have different social and political effects. In this paper, I examine the effect of an understudied electoral institution: lower-level elections. I argue that elections at grassroots levels tend to favor the ruling party by allowing it to more fully utilize its resource advantage to buy political support, which would in turn undermine the opposition's ability to develop a local support network that is important to its struggle for democratization as well as for elected offices. Evaluating the effect of lower-level elections is empirically challenging because the effect is likely to be confounded with voter preference. I tackle this identification problem by taking advantage of a quasi-experiment afforded by the electoral formula of Hong Kong, which allows me to use a regression discontinuity design to test my causal argument. I find strong statistical evidence supporting my argument; the ruling elite's aggressive expansion in the District Councils, the lowest elected tier, aims to drive out the opposition elites, who, by occupying a District Council seat, are able to increase their vote share of that constituency by 4–5 percentage points in a subsequent legislative election.     

From the curriculum to the classroom: The urgent need for preservice human rights teacher education in the United States

Abstract

Despite recent progress made by the human rights education movement in the United States to bring human rights education into curriculum standards, textbooks, and classrooms, preservice and in-service teachers have few opportunities to receive human rights education themselves. I argue that future teachers urgently need to receive preservice human right teacher education for a number of reasons. First, social studies curriculum standards in forty-two US states include human rights standards (Advocates for Human Rights 2016). Second, human rights education allows learners to engage with the human rights framework and gain skills to advocate to end human rights violations. Third, for human rights education to be effective in ending human rights violations, teachers must teach in a way that can help to dismantle oppression rather than perpetuate it. Thus, teacher educators must implement preservice human rights teacher education thoughtfully. I address challenges to, critiques of, and recommendations for implementation. Following this, I build on these ideas with my own recommendations for implementation. These recommendations are based on interviews I conducted with members of Human Rights Educators USA, a national volunteer network of educators and advocates who promote human rights education in the United States (HRE USA 2018).     

UNDERSTANDING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: REFLECTIONS ON AN ACADEMIC OBITUARY —"ALAS, POOR YORICK"

It seemed that "Alas, Poor Yorick" was an appropriate subtitle for this attempt to respond to Understanding Public Administration. Yorick, you will remember, was the deceased royal jester, whose skull Hamlet inspected in the churchyard in Elsinore, causing him to meditate on the vanity of human life. "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come." Though not a professional jester, I am keenly aware of the ephemeral character of the work of Professors of Government and Public Administration, or at least of this particular one; though Festsehriften may be said to "lay it on thick", they cannot altogether disguise the rather plain face beneath. I am glad to be fortified by having the more distinguished countenance of Robert Parker alongside me, and I mean that.     

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.     

A Lockean Theory of Territory

In this article I defend a straightforward application of Lockean property arguments to territorial rights. The article is divided into three parts. In the first part I explain the difference between two rights to land: property rights and territorial rights. In the second part I explain why an individualistic account of a Lockean theory of territory cannot be used to theorise about territorial rights. In the third part I defend a collectivist version of Lockean theory of territory. I argue that it is possible to apply directly Lockean principles regarding land use to territorial rights. I punctuate my defence with examples where Lockean principles are intuitively helpful in resolving conflicts over territorial rights.     

Foucault and the Telos of Power

In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.     

Why Overcoming Prejudice is Not Enough: A Rejoinder to Richard Rorty

Abstract

Misrecognition, taken seriously as unjust social subordination, cannot be remedied by eliminating prejudice alone. In this rejoinder to Richard Rorty, it is argued that a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution can and should be combined. However, an identity politics that displaces redistribution and reifies group differences is deeply flawed. Here, instead, an alternative ‘status’ model of recognition politics is offered that encourages struggles to overcome status subordination and fosters parity of participation. Integrating this politics of recognition with redistribution enables a coherent Left vision that could redress injustices of culture and of political economy simultaneously.     

‘Responsibilty’ as a strategy of governance: regulating people living with AIDS and lesbians and gay men in Ontario

This paper investigates responsibility/irresponsibility as an important regulatory strategy, in two instinct but interrelated social sites – people living with AIDS and HIV, and lesbians and gay men, especially within the Canadian province of Ontario. This responsibility/irresponsibility technique of governance is developing in response to the struggles of people with AIDS and community-based AIDS groups and lesbians and gay men and the alternative strategies of regulation articulated through these struggles. Practices of ‘resistance’ and activism alter the grounds of hegemonic regulation/governance and point towards new techniques of governance. I show how responsibilizing and normalizing strategies in the context of social struggles over AIDS and sexual regulation allows for those constructed as ‘responsible’ to be managed through forms of self-regulation and professional forms of goverance of their live. For those who continue to be constructed as ‘irresponsible’ forms of criminal law, policing and public health governance are called into action.     

What comes first,democracy or human rights?

Minimalists about human rights hold that a state can have political legitimacy if it protects a basic list of rights and democratic rights do not have to be on that list. In this paper, I consider two arguments from Benhabib against the minimalist view. The first is that a political community cannot be said to have self-determination, which minimalists take to be the value at the heart of legitimacy, without democracy. The second is that even the human rights protections minimalists take to legitimize institutions cannot be had without democracy. These rights can only be adequately interpreted and specified for any social context if the interpretations and specifications result from democratic processes. Here, I bring out some important problems with these arguments and so conclude that they do not represent a robust case for rejecting minimalism.     

Rational moralists: The role of fairness in democratic economic politics

In this paper, we empirically test for the influence of fairness considerations on the willingness to redistribute income in private and in democratic decisions. In contrast to standard explanations of income redistribution, our theory takes into account that prices shift decisively as we move from the sphere of private contributions to politics. At the polls, it is nearly costless to observe social norms. Therefore, we expect individuals to behave more fairly in the political sphere than in the market place. We present experimental evidence which is consistent with this hypothesis. In distributive struggles, social norms moderate the inclination of human beings to behave like ‘gangsters’.     

The role of electoral geography in the territorialization of party systems

When does a country's social structure foster the development of territorialized party systems? This article argues that electoral geography – defined as the interaction between the geography of social diversity and electoral rules– is key to answering this question. I make two claims: first, the impact of geographically concentrated diversity on party system territorialization depends on the proportionality of electoral rules. Second, the types of geographic cleavages (ethnic versus economic) and whether they are overlapping or cross-cutting also affects the likelihood of party system territorialization (conditional on the electoral system). I test these claims with an original dataset measuring party system territorialization in 382 elections across 60 countries that also includes comparable cross-national measures of different types of geographically concentrated diversity (language, race, religion and income). The main conclusion is that proportional electoral systems and cross-cutting cleavages can act as a powerful constraint on the translation of territorial ethnic cleavages into territorialized party systems.     

Post-citizenship,the New Left and the democratic commons

This article investigates the possibilities for the emergence of more participatory forms of citizenship in the context of austerity Europe. Especially significant in this regard is the history of the post-war New Left who were critical of both social democracy and authoritarian Marxism. In this context I reconsider the radical ‘humanistic’ writing of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Not only does their work offer a critical understanding of the commons, but equally connects to the revival of humanism evident within the alter globalisation movement. Further I look at the development of different ideas for a revived Left including nostalgia for the social democratic period and the idea of cosmopolitanism. While all of this work has something to offer I seek to argue that it fails to adequately address the need to develop more ecologically sensitive and more participatory forms of citizenship. In the final section, I outline the importance of the struggle for a more democratic and autonomous society and the increasing importance of issues related to traditions of self-management and the idea of the commoner. The idea of the commoner could yet become one of the major ideological struggles of the twenty-first century, but this will depend upon its ability to excite the imaginations of Europe's increasingly frustrated citizens in the age of neoliberalism.