1st Edition
Cultural Studies of Rights Critical Articulations
At a time of global uncertainties and erosion of liberties, how will cultural studies clear a space for a parallel intellectual and political engagement with human rights practice? How will human rights thinking be liberated from its doctrinal approach to ethics and legal justice? This book forges an alliance between cultural studies and human rights scholarships, to help us better understand the changing and complex political context that continuously shapes contemporary violence. To date, interdisciplinary dialogue or institutional collaboration remains rare across the two domains, resulting in critical interpretive work appearing too vacuous at times and institutional legal work often trapped in doctrinalism. By opening a door for a new and engaging scholarship, this book will re-ignite debates and passions within communication and critical cultural studies in the search for global justice.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
1. Reframing cultural studies: Human rights as a site of legal-cultural struggles John Nguyet Erni, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
2. Honing a critical cultural study of human rights Rosemary J. Coombe, York University, Canada
3. Immanent law and the juridical: Toward a liberative ontology of human rights Hans Skott-Myhre & Donato Tarulli, Brock University, Canada
4. Human rights as an ethic of truth: Pragmatic dilemmas and discursive interventions Leonard C. Hawes, University of Utah, USA
5. Exiled writers, human rights, and social advocacy movements in Australia: A critical fugal analysis Ruth Skilbeck, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
6. The abuses of literacy: Amazon Kindle and the right to read Ted Striphas, Indiana University, USA
7. The postcolonial predicament of gay rights in the Queen Boat affair Julian Award, Concordia University, Canada
Biography
John Nguyet Erni is Head and Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of "Curing" AIDS, Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (with Ackbar Abbas), and Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities (with Siew Keng Chua). He has also published widely on critical public health, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, queer media, and youth popular consumption in Hong Kong and Asia. In 2005, he completed a Master of Laws specializing in human rights.
'This book is not aimed at the layperson, something which is evident from titles such as "Reframing Cultural Studies: Human Rights as a Site of Legal-cultural Struggles," and "Immanent Law and the Juridical: Toward a Liberative Ontology of Human Rights." This content, instead, is aimed squarely at those interested in critical and academic research on these issues; however, as a non-academic reader with a legal background and a well developed interest in the interaction between law and society, I still found all of the papers engaging and thought provoking. The authors have written papers that are successful in promoting the value of looking at human rights and cultural studies interactively, rather than from a purely legal or purely cultural point of view...the content would be a valuable addition to any academic collection on human rights and/or cultural studies.' Heather Wylie, Canadian Law Library Review
