The Reality and Hyperreality of Human Rights: Public Consciousness and the Mass Media

Scholarship on international human rights generally adopts two approaches. The normative approach focuses on treaties or other authoritative sources. The institutional approach emphasises governments, organisations or other actors charged with the norms' implementation. Much writing inevitably involves both approaches. Any critical stance is then often limited either to examining obstacles within the norms or their interpretation, or to pointing out the shortcomings of actors responsible for implementation. The authors of human rights scholarship are often activists, lawyers, diplomats or judges, and may include scholars with professional affinities to those circles. They largely confine their critical scope to those normative or institutional levels. Some theoretical writings go further, proposing broader frameworks, such as liberal, legal-realist, post-Marxist, post-colonial, feminist, communitarian or deconstructionist. Those analyses too, however, frequently focus either on prevailing norms (individually or as a system) or on the performance of the relevant actors. In this chapter, I shall examine a third layer of activity, the mass media. I shall treat the media as being on a par with, or more powerful than, the dominant systems of norms, insofar as the media determine the situations with which those norms are associated in the public mind; and as being at least on a par with organisations and governments, insofar as the media determine which situations are most visibly and urgently acted upon. The neglect of this decisive strand underscores the ongoing formalism of legal practice: norms and institutions receive the most attention, since they assume the official status proper to the promulgation, interpretation and implementation of rights. In most scholarship on international law and human rights, the role of the media, lacking any such formalised status, is cited, if at all, only tangentiallyMost human rights scholarship remains highly formalist, with a focus on norms and institutions. However, at least as powerful as, if not more powerful than, those norms and institutions, are the mass media. Consonant with David Kennedy’s concern that rights discourse can privilege some interests at the expense of others, the media must be seen as the force that overwhelmingly decides which norms and abuses count, and which are neglected. Public consciousness of human rights emerges not out of political reality, but out of a media-generated ‘hyper-reality’, impermeable to some of the world’s most heinous abuses. The media remain immune from the values of even-handedness that are conceptually presupposed by human rights law. In principle, human rights shun any zero-sum game, whereby the rights of one person or group may be traded off against those of another. The media not only plays that game, but must play it, as a matter of sheer time and resources. A ‘Hollywoodisation’ of rights still further contributes to forging a hyper-reality that remains at odds with the realities of global human rights

Information technology team projects in higher education: an international viewpoint

It is common to find final or near final year undergraduate Information Technology students undertaking a substantial development project; a project where the students have the opportunity to be fully involved in the analysis, design, and development of an information technology service or product. This involvement has been catalyzed and prepared for during their previous studies where the students have been told and shown how to develop similar systems. It is the belief that only through this ‘real’ project do they get the chance to experience something similar to what is expected of them when they embark on their chosen profession; that is, as an information technology professional. The high value of ‘near real life’ educational experience is recognized by many universities across the globe. The aim of this paper is to present examples from three countries - Australia, United Kingdom and South Africa, of the delivery of these team, capstone or industrial experience projects; their curricula and management processes. Academics from institutions in each of the countries share experiences, challenges and pitfalls encountered during the delivery of these information technology projects within their institutions. An overview of each institution’s strategies is provided and highlights specific issues such as the selection of projects, allocation of teams to projects, legal requirements, assessment methods, challenges and benefits. The pedagogies presented here are not exhaustive; however, the three institutions do have in common the implementation of a combination of constructivism with a community of practice approach in delivering the project unit. The three universities recognize the need for industrial experience and learning of applied skills, and therefore make these projects a compulsory part of the curriculum. The projects tend to be real life business problems which are solved over a period of two semesters, and in the case of Cape Town it could be two consecutive years of two semesters each. These projects tend to involve practical development (for example databases and web sites). The process of project-to-team allocation is generally similar in all cases. Despite their differences, team work related problems are quite similar in all three cases presented, and seem to appear as a result of team work complexity, and the number of stakeholders involved. The intention of this paper is not to propose solutions to these problems (as these would be context dependent), but to draw the attention to the main problem categories for similar schemes, these are; • project selection, • management of students, • management of academic staff, • student team motivation, • equality and diversity, • passengers, and • assessment. Furthermore, it is not the intention of the authors to portray one approach as better than another, however, the approaches are representative of how team projects are being delivered across the globe, and in particular, in the contributing institutions. It is hoped that the assimilation and dissemination of information regarding the various approaches presented will nurture further discussion, and open communication across the globe with the view to enhancing the teaching and learning experience of such projects

Research 2.0 : improving participation in online research communities

Web 2.0 thinking and technologies create a number of new opportunities to conduct research broadly labeled as Research 2.0. Research 2.0 is a growing area of academic and commercial interest, which includes research undertaken in online research communities. This research in progress paper explores the practice of online research communities using a case study example operated by the commercial market research company Virtual Surveys Limited (VSL) in the UK on behalf of their client United Biscuits UK Ltd. The preliminary findings are based on VSL and academics working together to improve the online research community participants’ response rate and the quality of contributions. Data collected for this study is based on meetings, participant observation, and a pilot survey of United Biscuits online research community (snackrs.com) members. Using the responses of 112 snackrs.com community members, a preliminary typology of motivational factors is proposed. This can be used to refine the recruitment and development of activities in an online research community. Also, a model for supporting online research communities to ensure longitudinal engagement based on an adaptation of Salmon’s (2004) 5 Stage Model for e-moderation is proposed, extending the 5 stages to 7 – adding the stages of selection and disengagemen

Scholarly collaboration across time zones

The barriers to global collaboration of yesteryear were, for example, country boundaries and time zones. Today however, in a world where communication is thriving on new technologies, these barriers have been overcome, not only by the technology itself, but also by the collaborators in a desire (and need) to extend knowledge, seize opportunities and build partnerships. This chapter reports on one such collaboration: a case study where the focus is the writing of a scholarly article between authors from Australia, England and South Africa. The challenges of different time zones, academic calendars, and managing the collaboration are outlined in this chapter. Findings from the case study suggests that the key elements of success are related to the individuals and project management techniques, and not the technology per se. The constructivist learning theory as well as the e-Moderation model are supported by this work and thus extend their application to the academic writing process

Global Libertarianism: How much freedom does international human rights law demand?

Abstract. Although international human rights and libertarianism both stem from Enlightenment rights traditions, their exponents have never engaged in meaningful exchanges. However, in recent years monitoring bodies have developed what is identified in this article as a ‘Libertarian Principle of Human Rights’ (LPHR), which highlights the two movements’ shared anti-authoritarianism. LPHR runs as follows: Governments cannot legitimately recite public morals as a sufficient justification to limit individual human rights. That principle may seem like a commonplace today, but throughout history, even throughout the history of liberalism, any notion that comprehensive catalogues of individual interests must trump religious or customary beliefs has counted as the rare exception. Human rights experts have never acknowledged LPHR, let alone labelled it as libertarian, often preferring to emphasise human rights’ compatibility with traditional belief systems. Yet LPHR forms a necessary part of any serious rights jurisprudence. It can be substantiated even for highly controversial rights, such as LGBTQ+ rights, suggesting that it applies a fortiori to more settled rights. Rights advocates might still distrust suggestions that human rights are bound by a libertarian precept, given libertarianism’s individualist assumptions; however, far from undermining communal and holistic conceptions of rights, LPHR bolsters them

The Status of Journalism in Kansas High Schools and Colleges

The main purposes of this survey are to compare the journalism curriculums in Kansas high schools and colleges with the requirements of Kansas newspaper publishers and their demand for trained journalists

Review of Leone Niglia, "The Struggle for European Private Law: A Critique of Codification"

Controversies around the European Commission’s attempt to codify European Union private law now usher the codification saga into the twenty-first century. Much EU scholarship has focused on the adoption of the Draft Common Frame of Reference or its shortened version, the Optional Sales Law Code (CELS). In The Struggle for European Private Law, Leone Niglia launches a searching critique that revisits the very notion of codification’s distinctly legislative paradigm. That model is, on his view, fundamentally flawed. The true function of a code goes missing. In order to grasp the full effects of codification, and to comprehend the purpose and function of some final text, we must, Niglia argues, shift our attention away from that legislative paradigm, towards what he identifies as a jurisprudential model. Codification becomes comprehensible, he suggests, only through an analysis – neglected in the existing literature – of jurisprudential actors within the process, such as judges and scholars