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

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...