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"In this article, we investigate the question of who benefits from language minority research by analyzing the discourses of language rights and human rights jointly, because language rights are perforce part of human rights. We argue that some 'small' minority languages flourish and others fail unless speakers of these languages articulate their voices and needs. We also explore how human rights discourses relate to traditional practices. The interests of local communities and the involvement of linguists do not enhance the status of minority communities unless linguists traverse the gap between academic discourses on rights and vernacular discourses on similar topics. African linguists are themselves in a double bind: on the one hand, they seek to promote the interests of local communities and, on the other hand, they have to meet their professional obligations. They are not able to address the material needs of local communities because advocating language and human rights cannot resolve Africa's intractable problems. In addition, epistemologically, African scholarship is not sufficiently contextualized to be relevant to complex, labile, and polyvalent contexts. The defining epistemological trope contributing to the crises in African scholarship on rights and other sociolinguistic topics is 'theoretical extraversion': African linguists construe their professional work as a space to test Western constructs rather than to develop endogenous knowledge practices, a situation that is difficult to overcome."

In the last 60 years, we have seen the growing development and articulation of human rights, particularly within international law and within and across supranational organizations. However, in that period, the right to maintain one's language(s), without discrimination, remains peculiarly underrepresented and/or problematized as a key human right. This is primarily because the recognition of language rights presupposes recognizing the importance of wider group memberships and social contexts; conceptions that ostensibly militate against the primacy of individual rights in the post-Second World War era. Drawing on theoretical debates in political theory and international law, as well as the substantive empirical example of Catalonia, this article argues that language rights can and should be recognized as an important human right.

This paper examines the contribution of human rights education (HRE) to conflict prevention and to the promotion of security. It outlines the difficulties in evaluating the long-term impact of HRE, but then proposes five benefits of a rights-based approach to education - rights as secular, man-made, requiring transparency, enabling freedom from degrading treatment and implying reciprocity. The paper goes on to describe the work of UNICEF UK's Rights Respecting Schools before acknowledging the political and contested nature of HRE, in terms of competing rights. Future work should include research on the impact of and countering myths about rights.

This article explores the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) and its attempts to translate international women's rights norms into national law, examining the problematic geographies of women's networks from local to global levels and showing how Ethiopia remains on the periphery of global human rights networks. In their campaign for legal reform to protect women against violence, activists had to show how the proposed reforms were 'African', as invoking international human rights risked dismissal as evidence of 'Westernisation'. Activists face practical difficulties, including lack of funding and technology, limiting networking beyond the national level. The article shows how the state shapes local activists' ability to form global connections. Legislation banning civil society organisations such as EWLA from conducting work around rights threatens to marginalise Ethiopia further from global human rights networks and norms. Local connectivity to the global is only partial, mediated by the power relations in which activists and the state are embedded.

This study focuses on the social formation of game virtual property through analyzing two of its major stakeholders in China: online gamers and game corporations. Based on analysis of the opinions, stakes, and demands of the Chinese gamers, I argue that they are developing an incipient 'gamer rights' awareness composed of gamers' entitlements to virtual property ownership as well as to virtual property rights protection by the state and game publishers. Based on analysis of the stakes and strategic actions of Chinese game publishers, I show that these corporations promulgate a self-serving version of gamer rights protection campaigns and pass the social responsibility of virtual property governance to the state. This study's findings provide empirical evidence to support theoretical and legal recognition of virtual property, government involvement in virtual-world governance, and the 'right to play' critique.

The 1990s was the era of human rights awareness, democratic transitions, and growing involvement of international organizations and the nongovernmental sector in human rights education (HRE). The UN Decade for HRE from 1995-2004 was not only born out of t

This article interrogates the notion of Web 2.0, understanding it through three related conceptual lenses: (1) as a set of social relations, (2) as a mode of production, and (3) as a set of values. These conceptual framings help in understanding the discursive, technological, and social forces that are at play in Web 2.0 architectures. Based on research during a two-year period, the second part of this article applies these lenses to the case of the Human Rights Portal, a Web portal designed to leverage the participatory knowledge production ethos of Web 2.0 for human rights organizations. This section discusses the design process and the ways in which the discourse of Web 2.0 as parsed through the three lenses described informed this process.

This paper examines the contribution of human rights education (HRE) to conflict prevention and to the promotion of security. It outlines the difficulties in evaluating the long-term impact of HRE, but then proposes five benefits of a rights-based approac

This article examines the ways in which the complex and at times contradictory project of 'conservative modernization' has altered the terrain of education. It extends the arguments I make in Educating the 'Right' Way (2006) about understanding the 'right

Deconstruction arguably marked the last time that comparative literature was truly confident as a discipline; with a clear sight of its philological inheritance and posthumanist telos. Post-2000 comp lit, by comparison, has been plagued by insecurity over what it is and what it is not. At the present pass, even the discipline's recognized opportunity-which lies in its being well positioned institutionally to develop a worldly critical praxis responsive to the politics of the aesthetic-is experienced as a special burden; for no discipline wants to be responsible to "allness" (that is to say, to teaching all the world's languages and literatures) under the Malthusian market conditions that govern an enrollment-driven modern education. While there may be no ready solutions to the problems posed by the planetary imperative, one place to look for them is in the substantive discussions of translation and technics that lent self-assurance to literary education in the 1970s and 1980s. In the memos, letters, seminar notes, and texts written in this period, what emerges is a "right to translate" as the covenant of a deconstructive comparative literature.

"Alejo Carpentier's novel El siglo de las luces is a fictionalized account of how Enlightenment ideals traveled during the Age of Revolution, a meditation on how European, particularly French, ideas were transformed and implemented in new and unique contexts (e.g., Spain, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Suriname). Carpentier thematizes the passage of ideas as a process of translation, both linguistically from French to Spanish, English, or Dutch, and conceptually, from one specific culture to another with different demands of relevance and applicability. The novel complicates the classic issue of the translator's fidelity to the text in that the responsibility to convey a text's original meaning collides with a need to adapt it to the new context. In El siglo, the translator's fidelity to the original confronts the revolutionary's fidelity to the Event in the practice of translating texts, such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the 1793 French Constitution, as well as the Event of the French Revolution itself. This paper will explore the constellation of politics, translation, and fidelity in El siglo, with special reference to the relationship between political translation to propagate revolution and the revolutionary politics of translation."

"This article explores how human interactions with networked technologies enable and constrain the emergence of social structures that nourish public knowledge and experience. By adapting Anthony Giddens' (1984) Structuration Theory and extending its perspective to technology (W. J. Orlikowski, 2000 ), the study endeavors to examine the manner in which engagement with networked technologies by people outside mainstream news organizations reproduces structures that neutralize the power of media institutions to construct social reality, as well as the manner in which their actions simultaneously produce new social structures (N. Couldry, 2000 ). The study is grounded in analysis of the online activities of members of Machsom Watch-a women's organization that monitors the human rights of Palestinians at checkpoints set up by the Israeli army."

"Intellectual freedom has long been a desirable ideal and a foundational value for supporting democratic governance. Since 1948, it has been a universal human right. Given the unique nature of education in democratic societies, schools serve as a crucible for helping children understand and practise the rudiments of intellectual freedom. Drawing on a diverse sample of exemplary secondary school teachers across the United States (N = 81), this article describes how these teachers help develop intellectual freedom in their classrooms. Using their various disciplines as a vehicle, they primarily utilize collective inquiry to foster communication and encourage values and attitudes conducive to intellectual freedom."

"The questions that animate Sangeeta Ray's engaging new book on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak bear upon teaching and learning. The push and pull of being both student of Spivak's work and teacher of that work in the classroom and in the medium of the book are palpable from the first pages. We begin with a heading of "Partial Beginnings," and soon the "impossible" task of a book on Spivak is invoked (1). "[H]ow would I write her without diminishing her presence?" (1) asks Ray, facing, in fact, the double bind confronting every teacher: how to respond responsibly to the subject they have to teach. As Ray points out, Spivak calls attention to the play in Derrida's French between répondre à and répondre de that formalizes several options here. Thus, "give an answer to," "answering to," "being answerable for" (Spivak, "Responsibility," 61; Ray, 72).1 None is predictably the right thing. Caught in this double bind, the teacher is left without a reliable device with which to calculate what her answerability to the material to be taught should be. So we receive "a version of the many possible books that were discarded and rewritten" (Ray, 1). Maybe it all sounds a bit dramatic, but in fact it's an experience of everyday life: like everyone, the teacher must decide how to go on, but every "instant of decision is a madness . . . a decision of urgency and precipitation, acting in the night of nonknowledge and nonrule" (Derrida, "Force of Law," 255). In her continuously reflexive engagement with the texts of Spivak, Ray does not cease reminding her readers that the urgent, productively anxiety-inducing scene of pedagogy is acted out in those texts."

In 1997 the government of Hong Kong reformed its policy on the language medium for teaching at the secondary-school level and removed schools' right to choose their own medium. Among the 404 public and "aided" secondary schools in Hong Kong, the governmen

The Right has done much of its work in the name of scientific "objectivity," wildly deploying a popular discourse around "the real world" to achieve a range of specific ends. Complicating this are the long-standing critiques of "objectivity" and "reality"

Drawn together against a backdrop of international conflict, and with a deep understanding of education as both an opportunity for the defence of human rights and as a route to exacerbating local conflicts, this edited volume seeks to develop a deeper, ad

We must act quickly if this precious resource is to be saved and the rights of SOPUDEP's school protected. Please forward this alert far and wide.

While Mapuche Indians in Chile complain that the government has "criminalised" their land-rights protests, many indigenous people are in prison in Mexico and Peru because there were no translators to explain why they were on trial. Demonstration demand

This article surveys the challenges college teachers in the United States will likely face in the near future and argues that overtly political attacks from the Right may be less important than the erosion of tenure entailed in universities' overuse of ad