A Cultural and Rhetorical Analysis of Internationalized Human Rights Discourse
Karen Ruth Dwyer
- School: Purdue University (0183)
- Degree: Ph.D.
- Date: 1997 pp: 139
- Advisor: Lauer, Janice
- Source: DAI-A 59/01, p. 155, Jul 1998
- Subjects: Language, Rhetoric and Composition (0681)
- ProQuest Document Number:
- ISBN: 0-591-73420-6
- UMI Number: AAT 9821735
Abstract:
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The purpose of the present study is to theorize oppositional discourse that has not yet been
conceptualized within existing composition studies. The study examines the discourse of
Amnesty International, a prestigious human rights organization drawing its mandate from
the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Amnesty International delineates and defines human rights,
providing forums in which victims and witnesses may speak and be heard, creating
international discourse publics, constructing a human rights activist subject position,
and developing other techniques and strategies by which to work. This study investigates:
(1) the ways oppositionality of human rights and human rights discourse originated and
developed; (2) the reasons and ways human rights and its discourse have become
internationalized; (3) the methods by which the activist subject position has been
constructed; and (4) the ways in which human rights limitations are revealed in
discourse. The contemporary version of human rights that has been internationalized
was engendered by the Western market capitalist economic system as a result of the rise
of the nation state. I argue here that human rights is a contemporary phenomenon that
arises from an historically specific set of material and social conditions and that the
contemporary signifying practices that make human rights possible construct human rights as
a way of knowing and interpreting human experience.
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