Sally Engle Merry - Unpacking the Vernacularization Process

http://www.uwindsor.ca/socialjustice/video-conferences

Thursday, March 5, 2009, University of Windsor, Ontario
UNPACKING THE VERNACULARIZATION PROCESS: The Transnational
Circulation of Women's Human Rights

Professor Sally Engle Merry, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Law and Society at New York University.

How do human rights travel from the sites where they are created to urban neighborhoods around the world? Their adoption depends on the process of vernacularization: The translation of ideas and practices developed in cosmopolitan centres such as United Nations conference in New York and Geneva into terms appropriate for local context. While the human rights project aspires to promote universal values about women's equality with men, vernacularization guarantees that they will not be adopted in whole cloth. Some of the most important actors in the process are women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that use the human rights framework. This analysis grows out of a comparative study of women's human rights NGOs working in urban areas in China, India, Peru, and the USA and shows that the spread of human rights is a fractured process by which techniques, issues, and helping strategies are adopted differentially depending on institutional support and cultural resonance. Instead of cultural homogenization, the spread of human rights is a fragmented and uneven process joining international, national, and local forms of ideology and practice.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Sally Engle Merry
• social justice
• culture
• human rights
• University of Windsor
• women
• equality
• homogenization
• Anthropology
• gender
• violence

[NoVeilOnMe]

Interesting... I don't think she swallows though