Human Rights in Theory and Practice · Human Rights
literally 3 projects, and she grades pretty fairly.
Tons of reading every week from a textbook that provides you useless information, and links to website. The lectures are dry, and participation/attendance obviously didn't count because I went 5 times and got an A. A midterm and a final.
human rights framework internationally. content is bit of a long read most of the time, but honestly skimming is just as good. this class is obv very useful in our current climate of extremism, and it's also so interesting once you get into the nitty-gritty of it. would recc to anyone.
This was the most imperial and neocolonial class I have ever taken at Barnard/Columbia. I genuinely want to save any first year from ever taking this class because the overriding message of the entire course was that Third World Countries commit the most violence and are in need of Western countries to go in and change them. The class completely lacked in any critical analysis of human rights as a field / justification for Western imperialism, and completely lacked in tying violence that happens around the world to the human rights abuses of Western civilization. My TA literally asked me once what the American military should do about a conflict between a government in a Southeast Asian country and the indigenous people that live there - as if he was advocating that the American military should enter into the conflict. If you are taking or thinking about taking this class, please do not trust the readings or the professor. HIs framework is ultimately oriented around imperialism and white supremacy, even though he's a nice guy.
About 4-8 readings per week. 3 assignments: one 3 page midterm (outline for the final), one 4 page news analysis (to exercise media literacy) and one 10 page final (based on the midterm. You get to choose the topic for all assignments. Grading is fair.
Who cares you don't have to do any of it, "prepared" for my midterm and final the night before and even that was a waste of time. Papers took a few hours at most. What a joke.
Prof. Brown is amazing. As a human rights lawyers with incredible experience under her belt, you get to learn so much about the history and contemporary state of human rights as well as her own contributions to it. She's very knowledgeable and teaches without relying on slides. She's been all over the world and worked on so many different rights related projects so it's really interesting to get to hear her stories on it; it's not in a meandering or irrelevant way though, she applies it to what the course lecture topic is about. Each week we have a unit on a different area of human rights; ex. right to health, right to free expression, right to reparations, etc. She makes an effort to be accessible to students and overall you can tell she cares about your success. Great professor all around.
Oh lord, what a wonderfully useless class. I'm the type of person that goes to every class, reads every homework assignment and takes copious lecture notes, but, after the midterm, I hardly went to class, didn't do a SINGLE reading after the midterm (not one, I swear) and didn't take even a page of notes and got an A-. That's because your midterm and final are (in-class) open-internet. Yes. Open-internet. As in, he gives you some questions and you google it (aka, Wikipedia, which is allowed) and answer them. You're not even expected to use class readings because, as prof. Martin stresses, he's not interested in "what you know," he's interested in "how you think." Additionally, the two short papers that you have to write don't relate to the readings either. Human rights majors, this class is a gift to you, as it counts for your intro class. On the other hand, it's a complete and utter waste of time if you know even the basics about human rights and the UN. I mean, really, for the second half of the semester, "homework" consisted of links to websites that gave outlines of human rights topics (not even readings?) as well as REPEATS of readings that we already did. Really a huge waste of time, but also an easy A.
Three assignments: - three page midterm / outline for the final paper (30%) - four page news analysis exercise on media literacy (15%) - final research paper on a human rights topic of your choice (40%) attendance is mandatory and taken at every class (15%)
weekly reading that isn't necessary; two papers that have nothing to do with the class; a midterm; a final