Revisiting the past: human rights education and epistemic justice

Abstract

Epistemic injustice in human rights education (HRE) can be found in a colonial historical trajectory of human rights that rests on accounts of western agency only. Such narratives overshadow the legacy of Indian and Pakistani freedom fighters and Latin American feminists who negotiated human rights against colonial, patriarchal and racist discourses after the Second World War. Without their contribution a United Nations (UN) rights concept risked being limited to a western trajectory of the ‘Rights of Man’ that represents a monistic universalism. The paper revisits the history of the United Nations, unearthing historical counternarratives of what a pluralistic universalism of human rights means by adding knowledge about postcolonial feminist subjects who spoke of a positive conception that could reduce injustice.

Learning how to speak truth to power – comparing Ukrainian and Swiss foreign language curricula

“…The language of human rights might thus lead to new forms of exclusion, be it because some forms of human violation are not addressed by the languages of human rights, or because some violated people do not have equal access to these languages (Baxi, 2008). For this reason, myriad scholars call for a decolonial and more pluriversal form of human rights education (Adami, 2021;Becker, 2021;Williams & Bermeo, 2020;Zembylas, 2017). In the context of language teaching, it has also been suggested that the question of universality be discussed to ensure that cultural, linguistic and religious contexts are given due attention (Porto et al, 2018).…”