Human Rights Coursework

Reflection on the Human Rights Coursework in the MA in Human Rights and Social Justice Program

The human rights coursework within the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice program provided a distinct and rigorous intellectual formation and one that differs meaningfully from the program’s social justice components. While the social justice curriculum foregrounds activism, structural inequality, and collective transformation, the human rights stream offered something more specific: a sustained engagement with the legal, historical, philosophical, and institutional foundations of human rights, and with the mechanisms through which rights are protected, violated, contested, and reimagined. These courses collectively reshaped my understanding of human rights as a field grounded not only in moral aspiration but in political struggle, historical contingency, and the lived realities of communities whose rights have been denied.

Building the Foundations: The Architecture of Human Rights

Foundations of Human Rights and Social Justice served as the intellectual entry point into the human rights tradition. The course introduced the major theoretical frameworks such as universalism, relativism, intersectionality, feminist and disability critiques, and critical race theory, while situating them within the broader terrain of international human rights law and global governance. This was not merely an introduction to concepts; it was an initiation into a vocabulary and analytic structure that allowed me to speak about rights with precision. The course clarified the distinction between rights as legal instruments, rights as philosophical claims, and rights as political tools; distinctions that became essential as I moved through the rest of the program.

This grounding proved invaluable when engaging with more complex questions in later courses: What counts as a rights violation? Who has the authority to define harm? How do states justify the suspension or denial of rights? These questions became recurring touchstones throughout my coursework.

Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Reframing Rights Through Relational Epistemologies

Although Indigenous Ways of Knowing is often associated with social justice, it played a crucial role in reshaping my understanding of human rights. The course challenged the epistemological assumptions embedded in Western rights discourse, particularly the individualism, property‑based logics, and universalist claims that underpin many human rights instruments. Through land‑based learning, community and Secwépemcstin language engagement, and the study of colonial legal regimes, I came to understand rights not as abstract entitlements but as relational responsibilities grounded in land, kinship, and community.

This shift was reinforced by my own research on the reserve system in British Columbia, where I examined how colonial land policies, the doctrine of terra nullius, and the frontier myth produced legal and spatial regimes that continue to violate Indigenous rights. The course made clear that human rights cannot be meaningfully pursued without confronting the colonial foundations of the Canadian state and the systemic violence that continues to shape Indigenous–state relations.

Genocide Studies: Understanding Atrocity, Dehumanization, and International Failure

Genocide in the 20th Century was one of the most demanding courses in the program, requiring sustained engagement with the historical, political, and ideological conditions that make mass atrocity possible. My research on the Bosnian genocide deepened this learning. Through the study of Ottoman history, orientalist stereotypes, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the rise of ethnonationalism, I came to understand genocide not as an aberration but as a political project rooted in dehumanization, myth‑making, and the manipulation of collective memory.

The course sharpened my ability to analyze how states rationalize violence, how international institutions fail to prevent it, and how survivors navigate the aftermath. It also taught me to “think and talk about genocide with care”, and to hold space for painful histories while grounding analysis in rigorous scholarship.

Trauma, Rights, and Justice: The Fragility of Rights in Times of Conflict

In Trauma, Rights and Justice, I confronted the limits of human rights frameworks in contexts of war, displacement, and communal grief. My final research paper, which examined the gendered burden of trauma in Newfoundland after WWI, Nicaragua during the Contra War, Bosnia in the 1990s, and contemporary Ukraine, revealed how rights violations reverberate across generations and how women disproportionately shoulder the labour of rebuilding communities.

The course emphasized that trauma is not only psychological but political. Rights become fragile in the face of violence, and justice becomes a long, relational process shaped by memory, culture, and the willingness to confront harm honestly. This course made visible the gap between rights as written and rights as lived.

Research as Human Rights Practice: Ethics, Power, and Accountability

Problem Solving in the Field transformed my understanding of research from a technical exercise into a deeply ethical practice. Drawing on Indigenous, anti‑colonial, and global south methodologies, I learned that research is never neutral; it is shaped by power, positionality, and the histories of the communities involved. My work on neoliberalism, capitalism, and Indigenous rights further reinforced this lesson, revealing how economic systems produce rights violations through land dispossession, commodification, and state violence.

Designing a full research proposal and ethics application grounded these insights in practice. I learned that ethical research is itself a form of human rights work, and one that requires humility, accountability, and a commitment to relational responsibility.

Global Structures and Their Human Rights Implications

In Emergence of Global Capitalism, I examined how global economic systems shape the conditions under which rights are protected or violated. My research on Argentina’s neoliberal and libertarian transitions illuminated how austerity, deregulation, and privatization undermine social rights, exacerbate inequality, and erode democratic institutions. The course made clear that human rights cannot be separated from political economy; rights are always embedded within, and constrained by global structures of power.

Field Experience in Nepal: Human Rights in Practice

The field school in Nepal provided the most direct encounter with human rights work. Engaging with NGOs working on disability rights, women’s empowerment, youth mobilization, and rural development allowed me to see how rights are negotiated in contexts shaped by poverty, political instability, and migration. My research on Nepal’s outmigration crisis further revealed how economic precarity, remittance dependency, and rural depopulation create systemic rights challenges that require both local and global responses.

This experience grounded the program’s theoretical learning in lived reality and reminded me that human rights work is always contextual, relational, and shaped by local histories and constraints.

A Distinctive Human Rights Formation

Taken together, the human rights coursework offered a coherent and transformative education, and one that differs significantly from the program’s social justice components. Social justice courses taught me to analyze systems of inequality and imagine collective futures. Human rights courses taught me to interrogate the legal, historical, and political structures that define whose rights are recognized, whose are denied, and how those decisions are justified.

Most importantly, I learned that human rights work is not only about legal instruments or institutional mechanisms. It is about how we show up, how we listen, how we honour stories, and how we build relationships grounded in accountability and care. It is a lifelong practice, and one I feel prepared to carry forward because of the intellectual depth, ethical grounding, and experiential learning this program made possible.