Human Rights and Media
- NINT 5213 - Human Rights and Media (Spring 2008)
In this graduate course, students will study the international human rights movement with an emphasis on the crucial role that media plays in representing and responding to critical human rights issues. In the last decade, the convergence of new media technologies with the human rights movement has had a profound impact. This transformation has enabled the globalization process of human rights activism through the rapid distribution of web-based news, research, and visual representation. Digitalization has also crossed over with traditional media (television, print, film, photography, and radio) enhancing both the production and the distribution of human rights reports. The emerging interactivity between producers and consumers of human rights information is also changing as people once considered as objects of human rights reports are becoming subjects who are now creating, manipulating, and challenging dominant paradigms of media representation. This growing diversity has had serious social and cultural implications on how human rights information is received, engaged, and transformed.
The contemporary mediascape of human rights has now become a sub-field of the larger movement involving researchers, educators, journalists, film makers, photographers, writers, visual artists, web designers, and many other types of media workers. This course will study human rights through the lens of the media in order to critically understand the changing nature of human rights representation and how to better prepare for becoming involved in representing human rights.
(Note: Depending on in-class film screenings, some classes may extend until 10:30pm.)
Concentrations:Media and Culture, Governance and Rights