Human Rights Courses - Winter 2021 - Remote Instruction
- For day, time, room, and TA information, see our PDF SCHEDULE or the course search tool https://registrar-apps.ucdavis.edu/courses/search/index.cfm.
- For all courses not listed below, please refer to the General Catalog course descriptions: https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/courses-subject-code/hmr/
Undergraduate Courses
HMR 120A Art, Arch, Human Rights
Heghnar Watenpaugh
HMR 130 Topics in Human Rights
Amy Argenal
HMR 131 Genocide
Keith Watenpaugh
HMR 136 Human Rights in Mid East
Keith Watenpaugh
HMR 140A Human Rights & Pop Imag
Amy Argenal
Graduate Courses
HMR 200B / HIS 201I / CST 210X (cross-listed)
Prof. Charles Walker
Wednesdays 4-7, remote
This seminar will examine the long history of violence, memory, and human rights in Latin American and beyond. While the focus will be on repression, resistance, and their aftermath in Latin America, we will also explore theoretical approaches to violence and memory as well as the emergence of the post-World War II concept of human rights.
Although “memory” has been a topic for intellectual reflection since classical antiquity, it has experienced an upsurge in academia since the 1980s, particularly due to the rise of Holocaust Studies and the urgent need to reflect on gross human rights violations around the world. Crossing the social sciences and humanities, memory has become a category for critical inquiry as well as a political and ethical imperative that links intellectual reflection to political activism in the aftermath of authoritarian regimes, genocide, and situations of violence. Furthermore, “memory studies” now find spaces of institutional legitimacy in the U.S. and abroad as graduate programs and specialized journals promote scholarship in this area. This seminar will build on the call to "historicize" memory and to understand enduring trends in the use of violence and its and understanding.
This course serves as one of the two core graduate seminars for the DE in Human Rights: https://humanrightsminor.ucdavis.edu/de
READINGS (please track down copies of these books) o Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
o Greg Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre o Michael Lazzara: Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet
o Jason de León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
o José Carlos Agüero, The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path (available in February)
2 weeks on memory and trauma (I will provide the readings)
1 week on Truth commissions (I will provide the readings)
2 weeks of student presentations