“More than human rights” has a double meaning. One, it refers to a wide range of rights beyond political and civil rights (e.g. housing, education, food) that humans need in order to have a dignified life. Two, it also refers to the rights of more-than-human beings, including spirits, animals, mountains, rivers, trees, plants, and the like, without which human form of life is not possible. As a way of developing a more expansive understanding of rights and justice, this course concentrates on intersectional methodologies, transnational epistemologies, and non-Western ontologies. By doing so, it aims to address socio-economic, environmental, territorial, racial, gender-based, and sexual injustices in the contemporary global world. The main question that organizes the readings assigned for this course is: What would emancipatory political movements look like once we move beyond human-and state-centric approaches to rights? This course troubles human-and state-centered analysis of rights by examining the dialectical relationship between multi-scalar and multifaceted capitalist power structures and emancipatory political movements. Drawing on readings from abolition feminism, post-colonial, Indigenous, and literary studies, the course helps students explore alternative trajectories that the rights language assumes as it is employed and expanded by a wide range of political communities. The cases studied in this course include (but not limited to) the sovereignty rights of Indigenous Nations in North America, the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, the Kurdish liberation movement in the Middle East, the minority rights of Uyghurs in China, and the abolition politics of radical Black feminists in the US.
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