Human Rights during the Pandemic—Towards an Enabling Pedagogy

บทคัดย่อ

The COVID-19 pandemic that coincided with a renewed fight for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 has brought to the fore contesting debates about human rights in the USA. Such questions as who counts as “human” worthy of rights and whose freedom matters (often at the expense of whom) have been at the heart of the tumultuous events in US political and public life since the beginning of the pandemic. Set against this backdrop, this paper examines effective pedagogical practices that enable students to critically respond to these exigencies of our time. Using an intermediate literature course entitled “Memory, Human Rights and Global Anglophone Literature” I designed and taught at Elon University, North Carolina in Spring 2021, the paper outlines a few pedagogical innovations that I effectively put into practice while navigating the unique challenges posed by the pandemic. I use Joseph R. Slaughter’s articulation of “enabling fictions”—literary and legal forms that mutually inform each other to envision “free and full human personality development” of human rights—in the course design and execution. Building on Slaughter’s work, I argue that a pandemic-era classroom must integrate “enabling” activities that help students to meaningfully yoke empathy with interdisciplinary inquiry and transformative composition. An enabling classroom empowers a student coming from an entitled and insulated background to ethically imagine the pain of “the other” without reifying a hierarchical power dynamism that taints the ethos of Western human rights activism.