When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948, photography was considered a 'universal language' that would communicate across barriers of race and culture. 70 years later it is timely to examine the cultural impact of the framework of human rights through visual culture. Images are a crucial way of disseminating ideas, creating a sense of proximity between peoples across the globe, and reinforcing notions of a shared humanity. Yet visual culture can also define boundaries between people, supporting perceived hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, and justifying arguments for conquest and oppression. Only in recent years have scholars begun to argue for new notions of photography and culture that turn our attention to our responsibilities as viewers, or an ethics of spectatorship. This book explores questions surrounding the historical reception of human rights via imagery and its legacies in the present. Visualising Human Rights is about the diverse ways that visual images have been used to define, contest, or argue on behalf of human rights. It brings together leading scholars to examine visual practices surrounding human rights around the globe.

Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice examines the interplay between images and human rights, addressing how, when, and to what ends visuals are becoming a more central means through which human rights claims receive recognition and restitution. The collection argues that accounting for how images work on their own terms is an ever more important epistemological project for fostering the imaginative scope of human rights and its purchase on reality. Interdisciplinary in nature, this timely volume brings together voices of scholars and practitioners from around the world, making a valuable contribution to the study of media and human rights while tackling the growing role of visuals across cultural, social, political and legal structures.

This book explores issues of creation, distribution, and control of images through official and unofficial sources, asking what impact that has had on human rights and what the ethical implications are. The volume includes research from healthcare advocates, human rights scholars and activists, photographers, and visual anthropologists who see a need for more careful contextual interpretation of images in global and local settings. It represents diverse forms of scholarship and the ever-changing field of research methodologies, and it examines how human rights issues take advantage of visual methodologies and how the visual works to communicate these issues with the public. As such, this collection will be useful for researchers studying in the fields of visual culture and human rights.

The speed of technological development, from cell phones to artificial intelligence, opens up exciting new opportunities for promoting human flourishing. It also raises grave risks, threatening not only personal privacy and dignity but also our collective survival. Technologies of Human Rights Representation brings together three fields of research critical to securing our future: changing technologies, human rights, and representation. For each of these fields, this book asks key questions: How can we open the black box of technological advances so that we can more fully understand their effects upon our lives? What can we do to make sure that these effects align with the values of human rights? And how does the way we talk about technology and rights—from military reports and corporate marketing to human rights reports and poetry—amplify or diminish our capacity both to understand and to control what happens next? Contributors from anthropology, communications, criminology, global studies, law, literary and cultural studies, and women and gender studies bring diverse methodological approaches to these crucial questions.

The SAGE Handbook of Human Rights will comprise a two volume set consisting of more than 50 original chapters that clarify and analyze human rights issues of both contemporary and future importance. The Handbook will take an inter-disciplinary approach, combining work in such traditional fields as law, political science and philosophy with such non-traditional subjects as climate change, demography, economics, geography, urban studies, mass communication, and business and marketing. In addition, one of the aspects of mainstreaming is the manner in which human rights has come to play a prominent role in popular culture, and there will be a section on human rights in art, film, music and literature. Not only will the Handbook provide a state of the art analysis of the discipline that addresses the history and development of human rights standards and its movements, mechanisms and institutions, but it will seek to go beyond this and produce a book that will help lead to prospective thinking.

Medical professionals will be able to connect the science of biology to their own lives through the stunning visuals in Visualizing Human Biology. The important concepts of human biology are presented as they relate to the world we live in. The role of the human in the environment is stressed throughout, ensuring that topics such as evolution, ecology, and chemistry are introduced in a non-threatening and logical fashion. Illustrations and visualization features are help make the concepts easier to understand. Medical professionals will appreciate this visual and concise approach.

Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights. Using an innovative visual methodology, Redhead shines a new critical light on human rights campaigns in practice. She examines two cases in-depth. First, she shows how Amnesty International depicts women negatively in their 2004 ‘Stop Violence against Women Campaign’, revealing the political implications of how images deny women their agency because violence is gendered. She also analyses the Oka conflict between indigenous people and the Canadian state. She explains how the Canadian state defined the Mohawk people in such a way as to deny their human subjectivity. By looking at how the Mohawk used visual media to communicate their plight beyond state boundaries, she delves into the disjuncture between state sovereignty and human rights. This book is useful for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.

This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few. The book demonstrates the emergence of the ‘universal’ subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the ‘culture’ and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form. The book will appeal to scholars in comics studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies and to the general reader with an interest in these fields.