SOCI 6805: Advanced Topics in Political Sociology
Readings in Human Rights
Instructor: Bandana Purkayastha
Graduate courses act as Honors courses, with Honors credit awarded for a grade of B- or higher.
This course will offer a critical sociological perspective on human rights, with a specific emphasis on power, inequalities and people’s struggles to claim and access political, civil, economic, social and cultural human rights. We will pay attention to multiple actors–states, corporations, INGOs, NGOs, and activists–that are involved in shaping the terrain of human rights. Moving away from the dominant emphasis on scholarly work produced in the Global North, we will pay significant attention to the scholarship from the Global South. While I will add one or two other topics as/if these emerge as significant issues over the next few months, the current readings emphasize the following overlapping themes: violence (including routinized violence against minority groups, women and sexual minorities), local and global racisms, displacements and new tools of governance (focusing on migration and migrants, including those in camps and detention centers), control over and access to land and water resources (situating these discussions within larger questions related to environment, climate change and rights to science), cultural rights in an era of populism (including a focus on religions), and, questions of economic rights (including what is included and excluded under Sustainable Development Goals, and questions of human dignity in an era of precarity).
Students will develop a country-focused portfolio on a selected topic or develop a publishable quality paper on human rights.
Contact Dr. Purkayastha for a permission number to enroll.