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Human Rights Reporting

This page provides links to resources that support research and reporting on human rights.

Use these resource for background on what human rights are, and how they are discussed, studied and reported on.

Resources

Background information on human rights: definitions, examples, and research from human rights organizations, agencies, and researchers

Examples of reporting on human rights and related topics

Academic Journals

To find additional academic research on topics related to human rights, try searching in these databases:

Some starting points for finding stats and data on human rights related issues such as health, education, indigenous peoples, status of women and children, environment, poverty, etc.

Find more on the Library Statistics and Data research guide.

Books in the Library

Encyclopedia of Human Rights

Five-volume encyclopedia offers comprehensive coverage of all aspects of human rights theory, practice, law, and history. The set will provide situation profiles and full coverage of the development of the movement, historical cases of abuse, the key figures, major organizations, and a range of other issues in economics, government, religion, and journalism that touch on human rights theory and practice.

Reporting Human Rights, Conflicts, and Peacebuilding: Critical and Global Perspectives

This book focuses on the reporting of human rights in broadly defined times of conflict. It brings together scholarly and professional perspectives on the role of the media in constructing human rights and peacebuilding options in conflict and post-conflict environments. The chapters embrace a variety of theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches and will benefit students, scholars and media professionals alike.

Visualising Human Rights

Images are a crucial way of disseminating ideas, creating a sense of proximity between peoples across the globe, and reinforcing notions of a shared humanity. Yet visual culture can also define boundaries between people, supporting perceived hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, and justifying arguments for conquest and oppression. Visualising Human Rights is about the diverse ways that visual images have been used to define, contest, or argue on behalf of human rights. It brings together leading scholars to examine visual practices surrounding human rights around the globe.

Human Rights Journalism

Shaw argues that journalism should focus on deconstructing the underlying structural and cultural causes of political violence such as poverty, famine and human trafficking, and play a proactive (preventative), rather than reactive (prescriptive) role in humanitarian intervention.

Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights

What impact do mass media portrayals of atrocities have on activism? Why do these news stories sometimes mobilize people, while at other times they are met with indifference? Do different forms of media have greater or lesser impacts on mobilization? The book offers an array of case studies. By examining a variety of media forms, from television and radio to social networking, the interdisciplinary set of authors present radical new ways of thinking about the intersection of media portrayals of human suffering and activist responses to them.

Human Rights and Media

Introduces and analyzes the significant relationship and discourse of human rights and media. As agenda setters, framers and integral actors in human rights movements, various forms of media are analyzed by the contributing authors. News media, the press, television, cinema, photojournalism, the internet and other documentary forms are among the media investigated by the authors. Civil society dialogue, the rhetoric and ideology of human rights, the propaganda and media responsibility around such themes as war, genocide, ethnic division, nationalism, race, gender, child labor and disability are human rights themes addressed in this volume.

Librarian

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Hailey Siracky