Exposed and Affected: A Brief Study on Human Rights and Media

  “African Underground: Hip Hop in Senegal”  touched me because it showed how  using lyrics to preach positivity through  hip hop and how it ameliorates its community, defying the stereotypes that the masses might have about popular hiphop. This film was contextualized by Media That Matters. What do we mean by contextualizing the film? We want to package a film with more information than what is included in the content. Making a documentary film and screening it is called the dissemination of information, the first step needed but not the sole basis of creating change. Bringing in educational paradigms helps the narrative to shift into a transformative model. As a human rights educator, you need to open a space for discourse with an emphasis on public participation, not an attack on already set up laws. By creating different Strategies, you innovate different Ethics of Representation. Boca De Lixo  by Eduardo Coutinho  (the beginning can be v...

Screening: Pictures from A Revolution: A Memoir of the Nicaraguan Conflict. -Susan Meiselas. Meiselas photographed the civil war in Nicaragua and then returned to the subjects in her portraits, trying to track them down, 10 years later. She presents them with the photograph she took, outlining previous to her encounter with them why and how she photographed the scene followed by a non-invasive inquiry with the subject and the subject's family on how they felt to be a part of the event taking place within the photograph. Each photograph provides a narrative construction. The narrative construction prompts the viewer to contemplate memory and memory's place in describing a cultural conflict.  It begs the question: How do we retrospectively approach Meiselas’ project while maintaining an understanding of Avishai Margalit’s Ethics of Memory ? In Ethics of Memory , Margalit writes that our moral relationships are thin entities of behaviour, but ethical relationships align with...

What does "The Right to Information" mean when we discuss human-rights issues? is personal as well as societal. There are both distinctions and overlaps between what is important to an individual versus a collective and comparatively, there are also differences and similarities when we examine what it might mean to take action after certain information is relayed that indicates an ongoing threat in that society {shared values}, noting that “access to information is also important to democratic participation and control.” (64) When we are denied information we need to participate as citizens or residents of a particular society or region, we are stripped of access and that denial to access can fuel various levels of conflict. When the conflict reaches a state of urgency, we begin to question what to do about that conflict: For example, does conflict imply violence? What exactly is non-violent conflict resistance? Social movements are by and large non-violent. One impressive an...

Transformation: Showing peace to Astoria Boulevard, Astoria, Qns. Creating an illustration to signify that everyone has the right to express their personal/spiritual beliefs as a human being.

Personally, I find that the motivation for the United Nations to convene and ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights only after the genocide led by Hitler astounding. It took a grand exposition of a grand injustice for several nations to come together and determine a practical clause to prohibit such an atrocity from ever recurring (though, I'm sure that many of us are familiar that words will not foil a determined leader astray from his/her own agenda. Words are contestable. This is why we have lawyers.. to manipulate those words to one's own advantage. Furthermore, many similar, horrifying acts have inevitably made their way into history). I can only speculate why this particular incident caused a reconciliation and a response from Western sovereign states which were not and still are not necessarily innocent in terms of their involvement with genocides that have happened since then. However, to scale, an estimate of 5, 100,000 Jews were killed during the Hol...

Deconstruction  I have previously read many of Derrida's essays and applied his theories to break down symbolism in literature and visual arts. So, when I walked into my first Graduate School course on human rights and media, I already understood the approach that Professor Peter Lucas was taking in orienting my peers and I to an article written by New York Times reporter, Lynette Holloway . The article she wrote which we analyzed in this first course gave me the sense that she was interested in urban ethnography by exploring the community of homeless, gay youth inhabiting the area of the West Side highway in NYC. "The Young, The Restless, and The Homeless,"  connotes a sort of melancholy, all three adjectives in the title combined giving off the impression that the main subjects will be a marginalized population. We split into several groups to answer different questions, and mine had to answer the following: What do we mean by representation ? More specifically, w...