Human Rights in the Post World War (with Nora Nunn). Summer 2019
Building on the dissertation research of Nora Nunn (Duke, English), this project explored how U.S. mass media—particularly newspapers—enlists text and imagery to portray human rights, genocide, and crimes against humanity from World War II until the present. From the Holocaust to Cambodia, from Rwanda to Myanmar, such representation has political consequences. Coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who fled Hitler’s antisemitism, the term “genocide” was first introduced to the American public in a Washington Post op-ed in 1944. Since its legal codification by the United Nations Convention for the Prevention of Genocide in 1948, the term has circulated, been debated, used to describes events that pre-date it (such as the displacement and genocide of Native People in the Americas), and been shaped by numerous forces—especially the words and images published in newspapers. Alongside the definition of “genocide,” other key concepts, specifically “crimes against humanity,” have attempted to label, and thus name the story, of targeted mass violence. Conversely, the concept of “human rights,” enshrined in the 1948 UN Declaration, seeks to name a presence of rights instead of their absence. (https://bigdata.duke.edu/projects/human-rights-postwar-world)
I mentored Nora Nunn, who had worked with me for my Summer 2018 Data+ project, in designing a project that would expand her research through text analysis. Nora took the lead in constructing the intellectual framework for our students and in mentoring them from week to week as they explored the coverage of genocide in the media.