Murdoch University
Another Lecture sponsored by the Krishna Somers Foundation:
Professors Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
When: Friday May 9 4.30 PM
Where: Education and Humanities 3.041
Title: “Land of the Free’?: Circulating Human Rights and
Narrated Lives in the United States”
In the fifty years during which human rights has gained an international currency, personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. This is particularly true in the United States where personal narratives attesting to human rights violations frequently gain wide exposure through mass publication and publicity, media circulation, and global information flows. In this seminar we explore the circulation of human rights narratives in the United States, examining some of the ways that stories enter into public discourse—through published life narratives, television talk shows like Oprah Winfrey or news reports like The McNeil Lehrer Report, campus lecture and publicity tours, websites, and the like—and are taken up by popular and academic audiences, spurring debates within the fields of legal and political theory, international relations, religion, morality and ethics, often far removed from the originating event or site of human rights violation. We
are particularly interested in considering the many intended and unintended effects of this circulation on storytellers, their audiences, and the campaigns they represent.
Kay Schaffer is Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences (Gender Studies Program) at the University of Adelaide. She is author of Women and the Bush and In the Wake of First
Contact.
Sidonie Smith is Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of A Poetics of Women's Autobiography; Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body; Moving Lives; and Reading Autobiography (with Julia Watson).
