Human Rights

Human Rights Monument

UC Berkeley undergraduates interested in the Human Rights Course Thread should contact course-threads@berkeley.edu.

Human rights have become the moral language of today, the idiom in which we discuss our common humanity and weigh competing claims for resources, rights and protections. In recent years, premiere universities across the country have begun to develop human rights curricula, allowing students to shape their education around coursework that investigates the legal, political, historical, economic, social, psychological, and representational dynamics of human rights.

The Human Rights Course Thread illuminates the many different intellectual spaces in which human rights questions are currently being posed on the UC Berkeley campus. In so doing, it encourages students to recognize how human rights questions are intertwined with fields as disparate as postcolonial literature and medical ethics, as well as with the more familiar fields of politics and international law.

UC Berkeley is a fertile ground for human rights study and work: dozens of individual faculty members do research into human rights issues, and over 100 courses are offered each semester which directly treat human rights, while dozens more are indirectly related.