Human Rights and Wrongs is a 32-credit program of study taught Fall and Winter of the 2011-2012 academic year at The Evergreen State College. The instructor is Greg Mullins.

Our approach to the study of human rights is not via the usual routes of law and social science, but rather through literature, film, and the tools offered by theories of visual and textual representation.

To frame our work, consider these words by Silviano Santiago, written in relation to Brazilian literature but of consequence to the literature and films we will study:

“The Brazilian writer has a vision of Art as a form of knowledge, one that is just as legitimate as those forms of knowledge that the exact and the human and social sciences believe that they alone possess. He also has a vision of Politics as the practice of an art that seeks the people’s good and just government, dissociating it from the demagoguery of rulers, the populism of charismatic leaders, and the military force of those who seek order by any means necessary.”

(from “An Amphibious Literature,” reprinted in Imagining Brazil, ed. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinder, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005: 297.)