Understanding Social Action, Promoting Human Rights
Ryan Goodman and Andrew K. Woods of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School
Tuesday, August 12, 12:30PM
Berkman Center Conference Room
From Ryan and Andrew:
We discussed our book -- UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL ACTION, PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS (OUP 2009) -- which is a collection of new essays by leading social scientists sharing insights from their discipline for the betterment of human rights scholarship and advocacy. When we contracted for the book, we envisioned a two-part translation, first between disciplines, and second between scholarship and practice. We hoped the book's publication would mirror those phases -- by first collecting and editing the pieces in a volume, and second creating a website to share the research insights with advocates and other practitioners for their uptake and feedback. We've got a good sense of how the first phase will go -- assigning the chapters, receiving them, writing an introduction, etc. But we're hoping to be a bit more experimental with the second phase: we wondered if and how and why we might create a website to host the insights we culled from the various disciplines, and then apply them to real world human rights problems. The website is just an idea at this point, but we're looking for guidance as to: how much interactivity the site should allow; what audience we should aim for; where it should be hosted; who should run it, and for how long; etc.
Over lunch, we describeed the book project to date -- including the various mechanisms we've used to give coherence to the project despite the diversity of our authors' academic disciplines -- and then opened the floor to you for advice on the project's digital phase. We considered several options, including: a simple read-only page; a wiki; and a mapping project, depicting the field of human rights instruments, exposing the gaps."
About Ryan
Ryan Goodman is the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, and the Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. Professor Goodman received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. He clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has worked at the U.S. Department of State, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and nongovernmental organizations in India, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United States. His publications have appeared in the American Journal of International Law, the California Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the European Journal of International Law, the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. His publications also include International Human Rights in Context (Oxford University Press, 3d ed., 2007) (with Henry Steiner & Philip Alston), Socializing States: Promoting Human Rights through International Law (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008) (with Derek Jinks), International Humanitarian Law (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009) (with Derek Jinks & Michael Schmitt), and Understanding Social Action, Promoting Human Rights (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) (with Derek Jinks & Andrew K. Woods). He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law. His research interests include public international law, international human rights law, and international relations.
About Andrew
Andrew Woods is a Rita E. Hauser Fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. His work focuses on the role of culture and media, broadly defined, in human rights advocacy. His recent projects include: an interdisciplinary set of workshops on creative human rights promotion; GOOD Magazine, where he edits essays; and a web-archive of soldier stories, which hopes to encourage self-reflection by giving state-agents a human voice. Andrew is also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University.