Can the Arts Save Human Rights? Human Rights Truth-Claims in a Post-Truth Era

人权处于危机之中。最近的政治动荡--特朗普、英国退欧、民粹主义政党的崛起、对COVID-19的某些反应--既使后真相政治全球化，又将其嵌入西方民主国家。这些剧变意味着我们正处于全球转型和争论的时刻。社会正义的既定语言，如人权，正在受到围攻，而新的语言正在努力诞生。研究涉及两个假设。首先，艺术家和活动家参与的视觉艺术实践表明，人权工作中的事实降级，并寻求替代或补充框架和叙述（主要是视觉，表演和虚拟的新语言或习语）。其次，共同创作的视觉艺术不仅揭示了从事实到框架/叙述的转变，而且还揭示了对抗后真相形式的否认。合作是我们的重点，因为它具有实验性、想象力和跨学科的潜力，可以为人权提供新的语言或习惯用语。这是后真相时代团结政治的一个令人兴奋的因素。该项目由应用人权中心（CAHR）、约克大学和约克郡雕塑公园（YSP）作为合作组织共同主办。CAHR在艺术与人权的交叉领域拥有十年的工作经验，而YSP长期以来一直致力于将艺术与社会正义以及政策和实践辩论联系起来。支持研究的合作伙伴-学术合作伙伴，国家艺术组织和人权机构，以及国际发展非政府组织，援助组织-共同致力于利用艺术来动员社会变革，并提供对艺术-行动主义关系的不同见解，对合作实践的深入了解，和访问广泛的物理和在线公共/社区空间。这个研究项目结合了两个迄今为止独立的研究和实践机构。第一部分包括3个工作包，借鉴了CAHR的工作：1）Arctivism，CAHR和开放社会基金会之间的合作，资助世界各地的活动家-艺术家合作应对COVID-19。2)发展替代方案，CAHR和国际发展援助中心之间的合作，让活动家、艺术家和学者参与，打算设想主流国际发展的替代方案。3)约克人权城市网络，这是一个多利益攸关方倡议，将约克建成联合王国第一个人权城市，并寻求在地方一级落实人权，发展以城市为基础的人权文化。第二部分包括与过渡时期司法有关的两个工作包，这一领域为受专制统治和冲突影响的国家如何处理过去提供了信息。这些案例是哥伦比亚（正在进行的过渡时期司法）和加拿大（过渡时期后司法）。因此，工作包涵盖地方、国家和全球层面;过去、现在和未来;以及当代重大危机（对全球民主和人权的攻击、COVID-19、全球贫困和不平等、气候变化）之间的交叉点。每个工作包的研究分为三个阶段：第一阶段，评估现有工作的范围，然后作为第二阶段为新合作的资金和研究伴奏提供信息。第三阶段侧重于产出、传播和影响。一个非殖民地的角度-强调背景，多元的观点，具有挑战性的西方二进制-通知研究的跨学科方法，设想的艺术，实践为基础的和学术的输出范围，以及影响的多种途径。该项目将分析和促进新的人权语言或习惯用语，预计这些语言或习惯用语将包含模糊、隐喻、讽刺、破坏、不和谐和多种可能的解读。

Human rights is in crisis. Recent political upheavals - Trump, Brexit, the rise of populist political parties, certain responses to COVID-19 - have both globalised a post-truth politics and embedded them in Western democracies. These upheavals mean that we are at a moment of transition and contention globally. Established languages of social justice, such as human rights, are under siege while new languages struggle to be born. The research engages with two hypotheses. First, that collaborative visual artistic practices involving artists and activists illuminate a downgrading of facts in human rights work, and a search for alternative or complementary frames and narratives (new languages or idioms that are primarily visual, performative, and virtual). Second, that co-created visual art sheds light on a shift not only from facts to frames/narratives, but also to countering post-truth forms of denial. Collaboration is our focus because of its experimental, imaginative and interdisciplinary potential to inform new languages or idioms of human rights. It is an exciting element of a solidarity politics in the post-truth era. The project is co-hosted by the Centre for Applied Human Rights (CAHR), University of York, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), as a collaborating organisation. CAHR has a decade of experience working at the intersection of the arts and human rights, while the YSP has a long-standing interest in linking the arts to social justice and policy and practice debates. Partners supporting the research - academic partners, country-based arts organisations and human rights agencies, and the international development NGO, ActionAid - share a commitment to using the arts to mobilise social change, and provide diverse insights into the arts-activism nexus, deep knowledge of collaborative practice, and access to a wide range of physical and online public/community spaces.This research project combines two hitherto discrete bodies of research and practice. The first strand includes 3 Work Packages drawing on work by CAHR: 1) Arctivism, a collaboration between CAHR and the Open Society Foundations, which funds activists-artists collaborations across the world responding to COVID-19. 2) Development alternatives, a collaboration between CAHR and ActionAid, which engages activists, artists and academics intending to imagine alternatives to mainstream international development. 3) York Human Rights City network, a multi-stakeholder initiative that established York as the UK's first human rights city and seeks to operationalise human rights at a local level and develop a city-based culture of human rights. The second strand features 2 Work Packages relating to transitional justice, a field that informs how countries affected by authoritarian rule and conflict address the past. The cases are Colombia (ongoing transitional justice) and Canada (post-transitional justice). As such, the Work Packages span local, national and global levels; the past, present and future; and intersections between major contemporary crises (attacks on global democracy and human rights, COVID-19, global poverty and inequality, climate change). The research for each Work Package is organised in three stages: a first, scoping stage taking stock of existing work, which will then inform the funding and research accompaniment of new collaborations as a second stage. A third stage focuses on outputs, dissemination and impact. A decolonial perspective - emphasising context, plural perspectives, challenging Western binaries - informs the interdisciplinary methods of the research, the range of artistic, practice-based and academic outputs envisaged, and the multiple routes to impact. The project will analyse and contribute to new languages or idioms of human rights, anticipating that these will embrace ambiguity, metaphor, irony, disruption, dissonance, and multiple possible readings.