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

人权正处于危机之中。最近的政治动荡--特朗普、英国退欧、民粹主义政党崛起、对新冠肺炎的某些回应--既让后真相政治全球化，又让它们嵌入西方民主国家。这些剧变意味着，我们正处于全球转型和争斗的时刻。人权等社会正义的既定语言正在受到围攻，而新的语言正在艰难地诞生。这项研究涉及两个假设。首先，艺术家和活动家的合作视觉艺术实践揭示了人权工作中事实的降级，以及寻找替代或互补的框架和叙事(主要是视觉的、表演性的和虚拟的新语言或习语)。其次，这种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，也揭示了对抗后真相形式的否认。合作是我们关注的重点，因为它具有试验性、想象力和跨学科的潜力，能够传播有关人权的新语言或习语。这是后真相时代团结政治的一个令人兴奋的因素。该项目由约克大学应用人权中心(CAHR)和约克郡雕塑公园(YSP)共同主办，是一个合作组织。卡尔有十年从事艺术和人权交叉领域工作的经验，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行动援助-共同致力于利用艺术推动社会变革，并提供对艺术与行动主义关系的不同见解，对合作实践的深入知识，以及进入广泛的物理和在线公共/社区空间。该研究项目结合了迄今为止两个独立的研究和实践实体。第一条线索包括3个工作包，借鉴CAHR的作品：1)Arctivist，CAHR和开放社会基金会的合作，为世界各地响应新冠肺炎的活动家和艺术家的合作提供资金。2)发展替代方案，这是非洲人权委员会和行动援助组织之间的一项合作，让积极分子、艺术家和学者参与进来，设想替代主流国际发展的替代方案。3)约克人权城市网络，这是一个多方利益攸关方倡议，将约克确立为英国第一个人权城市，并寻求在地方一级落实人权，并发展以城市为基础的人权文化。第二部分介绍了与过渡时期司法有关的2个工作包，这一领域向受威权统治和冲突影响的国家介绍如何处理过去的问题。这些案件是哥伦比亚(正在进行的过渡司法)和加拿大(过渡后司法)。因此，一揽子工作涵盖地方、国家和全球各级；过去、现在和未来；以及当代主要危机(对全球民主和人权的攻击、新冠肺炎、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，范围确定阶段，对现有工作进行评估，然后作为第二阶段，告知新合作的资金和研究配套。第三阶段侧重于产出、传播和影响。一种非殖民主义的视角--强调背景、多元视角、挑战西方二元论--提供了研究的跨学科方法、设想的艺术、实践和学术成果的范围，以及产生影响的多种途径。该项目将分析新的人权语言或习语并作出贡献，预计这些语言或习语将包含歧义、比喻、讽刺、干扰、不协调和多种可能的读法。

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.