Recognising human rights

A new book co-authored by an Adelaide academic could not be better timed.

Human rights issues did not feature in the recent US presidential election, "yet," says Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition co-author Professor Kay Schaffer, "there has never been a greater threat to a global order of human rights than now".

The book, which Professor Schaffer (from the university's Discipline of Gender and Labour Studies) co-wrote with Professor Sidonie Smith from the University of Michigan, links the effectiveness of storytelling to social movements and the advance of human rights.

The authors mount a timely argument that storytelling remains a vital and potent force connecting victims and listeners in ways that extend human rights, freedom and dignity.

They compare the demise of a human rights agenda today with successful campaigns in the 1990s, a decade of reconciliation.

The book features South Africa's Apartheid era and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that evolved following election of the first multi-racial government.

The South African story is one of five case studies chosen by the authors, which enabled them "to consider the conflicted and indeterminate ways in which storytelling connects to human rights campaigns that have been and are taking place around the globe".

The others are Australia and the National Inquiry into the Forced Separation of Indigenous Children from their Families; East and Southeast Asia and the belated narratives of World War Two sex prisoners; the United States and prison rights narratives; and China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition is published by Palgrave MacMillan, and has a RRP of $52.