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、英国脱欧、民粹主义政党的兴起、对COVID-19的某些反应——既使后真相政治全球化，又使其植根于西方民主国家。这些动荡意味着我们正处于一个全球过渡和争论的时刻。社会正义的既定语言，如人权，受到围攻，而新的语言则难以诞生。这项研究涉及两个假设。首先，艺术家和活动人士参与的协同视觉艺术实践阐明了人权工作中事实的降级，并寻求替代或互补的框架和叙事（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/叙事的转变，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，可以为新的语言或习语提供有关人权的信息。这是后真相时代团结政治的一个令人兴奋的元素。该项目由约克大学应用人权中心（CAHR）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有十年的工作经验，而YSP则长期致力于将艺术与社会正义、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、以国家为基础的艺术组织和人权机构，以及国际发展非政府组织ActionAid——共同致力于利用艺术来动员社会变革，并提供对艺术与行动主义联系的不同见解，对合作实践的深入了解，以及对广泛的实体和在线公共/社区空间的访问。这个研究项目结合了两个迄今为止互不相干的研究和实践机构。第一部分包括借鉴CAHR工作的3个工作包：1)艺术主义，这是CAHR与开放社会基金会之间的合作，该基金会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（Development alternatives），由CAHR和ActionAid合作，由活动人士、艺术家和学者参与，旨在设想主流国际发展的替代方案。3)约克人权城市网络，这是一个多方利益相关者倡议，使约克成为英国第一个人权城市，并寻求在地方层面实施人权，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2个工作包，这是一个告知受威权统治和冲突影响的国家如何应对过去的领域。这两个案例是哥伦比亚（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、国家和全球各级；过去、现在和未来；当代重大危机（对全球民主和人权的攻击、2019冠状病毒病、全球贫困和不平等、气候变化）之间的交集。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，然后作为第二阶段通知新合作的资助和研究伴随。第三阶段侧重于产出、传播和影响。一个非殖民化的视角——强调语境、多元视角、挑战西方的二元对立——为跨学科的研究方法、艺术、实践和学术产出的范围以及影响的多种途径提供了信息。该项目将分析并贡献新的人权语言或习语，预计这些语言或习语将包括歧义、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.