1st Edition
Emancipatory Human Rights and the University Promoting Social Justice in Higher Education
This volume explores the application of human rights to higher education through a critical lens. Combining theoretical and applied perspectives, it asks what a human rights framework grounded in liberation and justice can offer to ways of working and teaching practices in higher education.
Human rights, in this edited compilation, call for continuous critical engagements around the higher education transformation project. The book recognizes human rights simultaneously as law, values, and emancipatory vision. It showcases global north and global south perspectives and encourages a dialogue between the human rights approach and other approaches to higher education transformation, such as decolonialization, anti-racism, diversity and inclusion, and intersectionality. Individual chapters featuring a range of case studies written from global south and north perspectives critically examine higher education practices linked with human rights, ranging from curricular practices to student activism and community partnerships. The critical space of the university and its role in the transformation of society is therefore viewed in multi-dimensional ways.
Underlining the value of applying human rights as a framework in understanding and designing higher education transformation, the book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of the sociology of education, human rights education, higher education, and social justice education
Introduction: Emancipatory Human Rights and the University Felisa Tibbitts and André Keet Part 1: Theory 1. What Do Human Rights Have to Do With It? Links Between the University and the Human Rights Regime Felisa Tibbitts 2. Critique and Disputations: Human Rights, Africanisation, Decolonisation, and the Project of Decentred Critical University Studies André Keet, Tinyiko Chauke, Luan Staphorst, Hashali Hamukuaya, and Neil Honeycomb 3. Epistemic Violence and Human Rights in the American Academy Davita Silfen Glasberg and Matthew W. Hughey 4. Decolonial Human Rights Education in the University Sector: Critical Possibilities Michalinos Zembylas Part 2: Looking Inside the University 5. Centering the Humanity of Student Activists: Pedagogy as Resistance to Neoliberalism in U.S. Higher Education Lori E. Durako Fisher and Chelsea Gilbert 6. Universities as Sites of Protection: Insights from the Global South on Gender-Based Violence Paul Gready, Fiona Anciano, Boitumelo Papane, Zamantungwa Mvelase, and Aaron Mushengyezi 7. A Feminist Lens on Gender Equality in High-Rank Research Positions at the National Autonomous University of Mexico Regina Cortina and Romina Quezada 8. Human Rights Curriculum Programming in South African Universities Rachel Karnoff and André Keet Part 3: Looking Outside the University 9. Emancipatory Scholarship and Emancipatory Human Rights: The Transition Township Project – Lessons for University and Community Partnerships Janet Cherry and Gary Prevost 10. Critical Transformative Migration Studies and Higher Education in Emergencies (HEiE) Jane Pak and Barbara Moser-Mercer 11. Bringing Human Rights into the Heart of Psychology and Social Work Education Peter Dijkstra and Polli Hagenaars 12. Human Rights in U.S. Professional Education: Identifying and Overcoming Challenges Amy B. Ramirez and Virginia Rowthorn Conclusion: Contestations, Synergies and Some Ways Forward André Keet and Felisa Tibbitts
Biography
Felisa Tibbitts is UNESCO Chair of Human Rights in Higher Education and Carla Atzema-Looman Chair in Human Rights Education in the Human Rights Centre (SIM) at Utrecht University (Netherlands). She is also Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Political Science at Columbia University. Her research and policy interests include peace, human rights, and global citizenship education; curriculum policy and reform; critical pedagogy; and human rights and higher education transformation.
André Keet holds the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University and is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Engagement and Transformation at the same university. He is a former Visiting Professor at the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality, Carnegie School of Education, Leeds Beckett University, UK, and the 2018 Marsha Lilien Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. He publishes on human rights, higher education transformation, and critical university studies.
