Browsing by Author "Becker, A."

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    Moral responsibility and speaking to the 'dark side of human rights'
    (HESA, 2017) Becker, A.
    This article uses a postmodern lens to question assumptions inherent to three normative claims for the human rights project in the context of post-1994 South Africa. The claims are that human rights are part of humanity’s narrative of progress; that they are universal and inclusive; and that their subject is the liberal humanist subject. Kapur (2006) argues that these claims paradoxically point to the ‘dark side of human rights’. By plugging data into theory and theory into data (Jackson & Mazzei 2012). I argue that student-teachers engage with human rights in a discursive manner and structure relations between self and the Other in rational human rights spaces. I pose that by choosing responsibility for an Other[i], South Africans can transcend rational spaces and structure relations between self and an Other in moral spaces. In moral spaces the conflict inherent to the contradictory nature of moral choices and the conflict between self-consciousness and renunciation present possibilities for continually re-structuring human rights and a humane world (cf. Fanon,1967).
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    On critique, dissensus and human rights literacies
    (HESA, 2017) Roux, C.; Becker, A.
    Globally, issues such as xenophobia, rising nationalism and populism, linked to the international migrant crisis, are stretching the past influence and the present reinterpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to its limits. Locally, the #MustFall[i] protests at higher education institutions rightly question the existence and validity of human rights, especially as it pertains to the right to education, socio-economic rights and the moral responsibility of higher education institutions to its students within human rights policy frameworks. The growing critique of human rights is crucial not only to the understanding of the conceptual, legal, moral, historic and contextual complexities of human rights but also the rethinking of the anthropological, ethical, ontological and epistemological premise of human rights. Human rights literacies, we argue, while including knowledge about human rights, question the social and moral consequences of the (non)realisation of human rights as well as the anthropological, ethical, ontological and epistemological premise of human rights. Critique and dissensus are inherent to human rights literacies and impact on how we speak and act to in(ex)clusions, marginalisation, intolerance, disrespect, misrecognition and discrimination.