Human Rights & Visual Culture

Birbeck College
University of London
11th June 2010

How are human rights represented and disseminated through visual culture? What is the role of visual culture in the formation of human rights politics and practices? How radical is the use of visual, online and web based media by human rights activists? Is there a visual politics of human rights?
This colloquium will bring scholars, campaigners and practitioners together to show examples of human rights in film, television, digital media and photography and discuss ways in which we can conceptualise and understand the emergence of visual culture in the human rights political arena.
The review will be coming soon.
SPEAKERS include
Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck) a regular contributor to The Guardian on human rights, and author of Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism and The End of Human Rights;
Oscar Guardiola- Rivera (Birkbeck) author of What If Latin America Ruled the World? How the Second World Will Take the First into the 22nd Centuryand Being Against the World, Rebellion and Constitution;
Roger Hallas (Syracuse)author of Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image and co-editor of Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture;
Jacqueline Maingard (Bristol) author of South African National Cinema and engaged in scholarship on visual culture on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC);
Les Moran (Birkbeck) author of Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety and co- editor of Law’s Moving Image;
Gita Sahgal filmmaker and journalist, and former Head of the Gender Unit for Amnesty International; credits include Love Snatched and The War Crimes File, co-editor of Refusing Holy Orders, Women and Fundamentalism in Britain;
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck) co-editor of Law’s Moving Image, has taught on the EIUC summer school on Cinema and Human Rights.
Michael Uwemedimo (Roehampton)curator, filmmaker and member of Vision Machine Film Project which produced The Globalisation Tapes and currently working on the Niger Delta advocacy project