Doctoral Dissertation Research: Domesticating Human Rights: Examining Political Opportunities and Consciousness in the United States

本项目考察了妇女社会运动组织的联盟，以解释美国组织向使用人权的转变，并解释这种转变对参与者人权意识的影响，从而解释他们在美国权利体系中的地位和机构。美国政府对人权的拒绝可能解释了为什么被边缘化的有色人种妇女正在利用这一概念来建立一个国内的生殖正义社会运动，挑战狭隘的生殖权利分析。美国缺乏人权法，这将导致动员人权话语的机会减少，从而削弱对人权效用的信念。 然而，自1997年成立以来，该联盟已从16个组织发展到80多个组织，另有数百名个人成员。本研究通过访谈、观察、档案分析和问卷调查，试图了解在美国社会运动一般不参与人权话语、国家一般拒绝人权话语的情况下，联盟为何选择将人权话语融入其中，以及联盟对人权话语的融入如何影响成员个人的自我意识和他人作为权利承担者的意识。这一跨学科项目涉及人权、法律的意识、社会运动框架和集体身份以及边缘化身份的交叉点等方面的学术研究，以解释该联盟的反常选择和成功。这个联盟的道路表明，目前的文献未能解决这些新的可能性，提高认识和动员周围的人权。这项研究将提高社会法律对由于在机构和个人两级加强全球对话而在权利理解方面发生的变化的理解。此外，调查结果将阐明人权话语的“本土化”，增加包括法律，社会学，政治学和性别研究在内的多学科奖学金，最终增加了解法律和法律的话语如何渗透社会生活和社会运动所需的跨学科对话。

This project examines a coalition of women's social movement organizations to both explain the shift toward use of human rights by US-based organizations and to explain and effects of the shift on participants' human rights consciousness and therefore interpretation of their status and agency within the U.S. rights system. The rejection of human rights by the US state may explain why marginalized women of color are using the concept to build a domestic social movement for reproductive justice that challenges narrower reproductive rights analysis. The lack of human rights law in the US should result in fewer opportunities to mobilize human rights discourse, which would result in weakened belief in the utility of human rights. Yet, since its founding in 1997, the coalition has grown from 16 to over 80 organizations, with hundreds of additional individual members. Drawing on interviews, observation, archival analysis and a survey, this research seeks to understand why the coalition chose to integrate human rights when US social movements generally do not engage with this discourse and the state generally rejects it. This project also aims to understand how the coalition's integration of human rights discourse impacts individual members'sense of self and other people as rights bearers. This interdisciplinary project engages with scholarship on human rights, legal consciousness, social movement framing and collective identity, and intersections of marginalized identities to explain the coalition's anomalous choice and success. This coalition's path shows that current literature fails to address these new possibilities for raising consciousness and mobilizing around human rights. This study will increase socio-legal understanding of shifts in understanding of rights due to increased global dialogue at both the institutional and individual level. Further, the findings will illuminate the "vernacularization" of human rights discourse, adding to the scholarship in multiple disciplines including law, sociology, political science, and gender studies, ultimately increasing the interdisciplinary dialogue necessary to understand how law and legal discourse permeates social life and social movements.