The challenges of teaching human rights

Human rights are a natural bedfellow to contemporary political sociology as they act as both legal standards and discursive tools that shape these same relationships. Teaching the political sociology of human rights often presents the challenge of confronting students' pre-constituted ideas about human rights as both a discipline, a discourse (or set of discourses), as well as in terms of the effects that human rights protection should have. This chapter considers the main challenges that arise when teaching the political sociology of human rights, focusing on three specific areas of interest. Firstly, we consider the challenge of reconciling the desire to promote and foster human rights protection through our teaching practices, with the awareness that in doing so we may contribute to creating a culture of (white) 'saviourism'. Secondly, and connected to the first point, we reflect on how framing processes in human rights teaching may privilege some voices at the detriment of others in the definition of what counts as 'human rights'. Thirdly, our analysis shifts to considering the tension between selecting representative examples of human rights violations in our teaching, supported by different types of data, and the reproduction of problematic social, cultural, and political stereotypes about individuals, groups, countries, meso- and macro-regions.