Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Global Citizenship

Workshop Leader: Jacqueline Jones Royster, Georgia Institute of Technology

Workshop Leader:

Jacqueline Jones Royster, Georgia Institute of Technology

This workshop will explore three terms and various intersections among them: human rights, civil rights, and global citizenship. The central objective is to bring some specificity to these concepts as ideas and practices and to the general discourses in which they are functioning in our times, an era in which we tend to speak quite glibly about "globalism" and "globalization" without adequately accounting for--typically--the assumptions, terms of engagement, processes, or values that are embedded within our actual use. The workshop will combine the reading and discussion of assigned texts with sharing and discussion of the participants’ own writing and with the collaborative research that they will be doing in the workshop in one of the three focal areas. The basic questions that will anchor these activities are: What does it mean to be a "global citizen"? How do our perspectives on global citizenship raise questions and implications for how we define, deploy, and value the concepts of "human rights" and civil rights"? What examples of a given concept, as idea and practice, do we find compelling as we think forward about ever-evolving definitions of national and trans-national identities?

Questions should be directed to Jacqueline Jones Royster, tank@gatech.edu