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

本项目考察了一个妇女社会运动组织联盟，以解释美国组织向利用人权的转变，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。美国政府对人权的排斥或许可以解释，为什么被边缘化的有色人种女性正利用这一概念，在国内发起一场争取生殖正义的社会运动，挑战狭隘的生殖权利分析。美国人权法的缺失会导致动员人权话语的机会减少，从而削弱人们对人权效用的信念。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，另外还有数百名个人成员。通过访谈、观察、档案分析和一项调查，本研究试图理解为什么在美国社会运动普遍不参与这一话语且国家普遍拒绝这一话语的情况下，联盟选择将人权纳入其中。本项目亦旨在了解联盟对人权话语的整合如何影响个别成员的自我和他人作为权利承受者的意识。这个跨学科项目涉及人权、法律意识、社会运动框架和集体认同，以及边缘化身份的交叉点，以解释联盟的异常选择和成功。这个联盟的道路表明，目前的文献未能解决这些提高人权意识和动员人权的新可能性。这项研究将增加对由于机构和个人层面的全球对话增加而导致的权利理解转变的社会法律理解。此外，研究结果将阐明人权话语的“白话化”，增加法学、社会学、政治学和性别研究等多个学科的学术研究，最终增加跨学科对话，以了解法律和法律话语如何渗透到社会生活和社会运动中。

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.