Creating Justice: Human Rights and Art in Conversation

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Description

What can art offer to facilitate a fuller understanding of human rights and human rights violations How do arts-based interventions help to highlight injustices, empower individuals and groups, and advocate for and effect change How do art practices help to reveal new dimensions of violations and aid in post-conflict recovery

In this edited volume, twenty-seven artists and scholars, working across a range of practices and approaches, answer these questions and many more through a series of conversations. They offer deeply personal reflections on creative labour, sharing original and rich insights into a range of ongoing social and political struggles, violent conflicts, and human rights abuses.

Reviews

A tour de force across several academic disciplines and artforms, this refreshingly innovative volume creatively reconsiders human rights abuses through exciting, mutually illuminating boundary crossings between the academic and the artistic worlds, too often out of sync with each other. Combining grounded theorizing with autobiographical testimony, it is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the messy and ever-changing reality of political violence and to imagine a way forward. -- Mihaela Mihai, University of Edinburgh
This is an innovative and exciting collection. Drawing together an impressive range of scholars and artists, working across different media and traditions, the assembled conversations illuminate the numerous ways that the arts can contribute to the pursuit of human rights around the world. Rich, rewarding, and challenging, Creating Justice will be of interest to scholars and human rights practitioners. -- Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge
Art is one of our best inventions. In this volume artists and scholars explore how artworks are able to resist and transform the structural violence inherent in Human Rights failures. A welcome contribution to understanding the epistemic differences as well as the ethical and political overlaps between art practice and IR scholarship. -- Lola Frost, King's College London

Author Bio

Eliza Garnsey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. Her trans-disciplinary research focuses on art and visual culture in international relations and world politics, particularly in relation to human rights, transitional justice, and conflict. Elizas monograph, The Justice of Visual Art: Creative State-Building in Times of Political Transition, demonstrates that there are aesthetic and creative ways to pursue transitional justice. Her recent book, Justicecraft: Imagining Justice in Times of Conflict, is co-authored with Lauren Balasco, Arnaud Kurze and Christopher K. Lamont.

Caitlin Hamilton is a writer, researcher, and editor. Her research interests include the intersection of popular culture and world politics, creative methods, and feminist approaches to peace and security. Her recent publications include The Everyday Artefacts of World Politics (2022) and the third volume of Gender Matters in Global Politics (2023, co-edited with Laura J. Shepherd). She is also the founder of Hamilton Editorial which offers editing and mentoring services for academic writers.