Keet Andre

In this introductory chapter, we see it fit to revisit our research and engagement with HRE, trying to make sense of the shifts in our own theorisation to disclose radical-alternative possibilities for thinking and doing HRE. Through telling the story of how we entered the field and started writing about our concerns with HRE, we show the evolution of our thinking that has eventually become the present book. While doing so, we raise a cluster of questions that led us eventually to write this book: Does HRE exist? Did HRE exist before? If it did, how did it ‘disappear?’ If it did not, what is it that goes by the appellation of HRE? To engage with these questions is to work through the appearances of HRE in order to pierce through the surfaces and scenarios of the truths it produces. Such engagement is deeply concerned by what is clustered under its banner, and how its discursive authority is constructed and mobilised to thwart the global project of emancipation.

This chapter takes up Arendt’s ‘aporetic’ framing of human rights as well as Rancière’s critique and suggests that reading them together may offer another way to re-envision human rights and HRE along the lines discussed throughout this book—not only because they make visible the perplexities of human rights, but also in that they call for an agonistic understanding of rights; namely, the possibility to make new and plural political and ethical claims about human rights as practices that can be evaluated critically rather than taken on faith. This chapter contributes to discussions in other chapters about the need for a renewal of HRE by suggesting that the paradoxes of human rights—such as the disparity between the reality of the human condition and the abstract ideal of human rights—can be politically and pedagogically invigorating by rethinking human rights in agonistic terms and formulating more robust practices of HRE.

This chapter summarises the global dominance of human rights discourse and the well-established international consensus on its importance, focusing on how HRE has proliferated from the mid-1990s onwards. Instead of advancing criticality as a central purpose of education, however, HRE, as co-constructed within the agencies of the United Nations, became the uncritical legitimating arm of human rights universals. Thus, it has ultimately contributed to the counter-hegemonic distrust in human rights that we experience today. Popular and dominant formulations of HRE, we argue, lack the conceptual and practical resources to be transformative, let alone emancipatory. Steering our reasoning through the historical development of HRE, we conclude that the time for Critical Human Rights Education has arrived.

Finally, this chapter revisits the theoretical contributions of this book in relation to the unfinished project of renewing and reimagining a critical and pluriversal HRE. We argue that engaging in this project is an unfinished and ongoing endeavour of highlighting that the struggle for global social justice is inseparable from the struggle for enriching HRE policies and practices around the world. Our theorisation in this book, then, makes a modest contribution to the efforts that view the pluriversalisation of HRE as inextricable parts of the wider task of decolonising knowledge and education and struggling for social justice.

This chapter argues that the implications of reconsidering normalised ideas in HRE can become more intelligible by engaging, through critique, with the crises of our times. The interplay between crisis and critique, so this chapter argues, will open up new possibilities for emancipatory praxes within HRE that are better rooted within social reality. An enhancement of the social justice potential of HRE is also anticipated. Treating crisis and critique as analytically and historically central to the program of critical theory, this chapter further suggests that the major shifts in critical theory provide productive pathways for the renewal of HRE.

This chapter explores how inequality and rights violations are legitimated and discursively organised by the prevailing discourses on Human Rights and Transformative Constitutionalism (HR&TC). Our case example is post-1994 South Africa, focusing on the notions of HR&TC as idolatry that generate a fictitious narrative of inclusive socio-economic and cultural-political progress in the ‘aftermath’ of apartheid, but we also extend our argument to the global human rights discourse. This narrative, into which HRE is hooked, produces a phantasmal ‘reality’. It follows, so we argue, that mainstream HRE does not have the praxes-related resources to escape the logic of neoliberal pedagogies and thus does not work against the economisation of rights and its conversion into capital rights. Consistent with our overarching project on CHRE, we suggest critique as a strategy to work against idolatry for HRE to contribute to developing antidotes to the phantasmagoria.

This chapter takes up Foucault’s politics of human rights and suggests that it may contribute to the renewal of HRE not only because it rejects the moral superiority of humanism—the grounding for the dominant liberal framework of international human rights—but also because it makes visible the complexities of human rights as illimitable and as strategic tools for new political struggles. Enriching human rights critiques has important implications for HRE, precisely because these critiques prevent the dominance of unreflexive and unproductive forms of HRE that lead toward a declarationalist, conservative and uncritical approach. It is argued that Foucault’s critical affirmation of human rights—that is, an approach which is neither a full embrace nor a total rejection—provides a critique that can be disruptive to the conventional HRE approach and creates openings that might renew HRE, both politically and pedagogically.

This chapter explores the entanglement between two partially connected concerns that offer the potential to animate current discussions on human rights teaching and learning: ‘affect’ and ‘counter-conduct’. Both terms are at the heart of HRE approaches that aim at cultivating resistance in children and youth so that they respond in critically affective and action-oriented ways to human rights violations and social injustices in ‘the everyday’. These concepts are used to explore: first, how to encourage children and youth to enact forms of counter-conduct that are critical in human rights struggles, rather than responses which are sedimented through the governing technologies of declarational approaches of HRE; and second, how these counter-conduct practices may constitute ethical and political practices that critique liberal and sentimental forms of affect about human rights violations. It is argued that theoretical insights that pay attention to counter-conduct and affect offer possibilities for reconsidering normalised ideas in HRE.

This chapter offers a plastic reading of ‘critical hope’ and a ‘left over’ form of a radical and transformative HRE that has not yet materialised. The premise of our argument is that generally HRE has, despite its explosive reserves, developed into an unproductive and declarationist pedagogy that works against the ‘critical’. Using Malabou’s concept of ‘plasticity’, a case is made that the regenerating HRE can best be conceived of on the level of ‘left over’ forms within which ‘critical hope’ is viewed as constitutive of its radicalisation.

This chapter argues that a decolonising approach in HRE needs to examine human rights issues through a critical lens that interrogates the Eurocentric grounding of human rights universals and advances the project of re-contextualising human rights in the historical horizon of modernity/coloniality. This alternative configuration of HRE as ‘critical’ and ‘transformative’ offers pedagogical and curricular possibilities that go beyond conventional forms of HRE and create openings for pedagogical praxis along social justice lines. The quest to create these openings and possibilities is a fundamental element for decolonising the theory and pedagogical practices of human rights. It is argued that the move to create spaces for decolonising pedagogy and curriculum in HRE can take HRE theory and practice to a less Eurocentric outlook and thus a more multiperspectival and pluriversal understanding of human rights—one that recognises the histories of coloniality, the entanglements with human rights and the consequences for social justice projects.

This chapter argues that there is an urgent need to engage with a deeper analysis of the contemporary culture of ‘political depression’ and its affective implications in HRE. In particular, this chapter focuses on the following questions: How might a theorisation of political depression be relevant to efforts that aim to renew criticality in HRE? In which ways can a ‘critical’ HRE turn our attention to important ethical, political and affective questions on human rights? Can the negativity of political depression become a site for HRE pedagogies that are ‘reparative’? This chapter makes an attempt to articulate some of the content and strategies of pedagogies of reparation and their significance in formulating CHRE. Reparative pedagogies invite in the classroom the challenge of how students can learn from unimaginable traumatic histories, while acknowledging the affective politics of histories of violence, oppression, and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality, but rather engaging in social justice-oriented action and activism.

This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium featured critical discussion in response to this concept note and presentations of potential chapter contributions for a book on the theme. The concept note is followed below by six responses by South African higher education scholars in response to Michael Peters’ and the CUS-SA concept note.

This book engages with human rights and human rights education in ways that offer opportunities for criticality and renewal. It takes up various ideas, from critical and decolonial theories to philosophers and intellectuals, to theorize the renewal of HRE as Critical Human Rights Education. The point of departure is that the acceptable “truths” of human rights are seldom critically examined, and productive interpretations for understanding and acting in a world that is soaked in the violations these rights try to address, cannot emerge. The book cultivates a critical view of human rights in education and beyond, and revisits receivable categories of human rights to advance social-justice-oriented educational praxes. It focuses on the ways that issues of human rights, philosophy, and education come together, and how a critical project of their entanglements creates openings for rethinking human rights education both theoretically and in praxis. Given the persistence of issues of human rights worldwide, this book will be useful to researchers and educators across disciplines and in numerous parts of the world.