Emancipatory Human Rights and the University: Promoting Social Justice in Higher Education

This volume explores the application of human rights to higher education through a critical lens. Combining theoretical and applied perspectives, it asks what a human rights framework grounded in liberation and justice can offer to ways of working and teaching practices in higher education.

Human rights, in this edited compilation, call for continuous critical engagements around the higher education transformation project. The book recognizes human rights simultaneously as law, values, and emancipatory vision. It showcases global north and global south perspectives and encourages a dialogue between the human rights approach and other approaches to higher education transformation, such as decolonialization, anti-racism, diversity and inclusion, and intersectionality. Individual chapters featuring a range of case studies written from global south and north perspectives critically examine higher education practices linked with human rights, ranging from curricular practices to student activism and community partnerships. The critical space of the university and its role in the transformation of society is therefore viewed in multi-dimensional ways.

Underlining the value of applying human rights as a framework in understanding and designing higher education transformation, the book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of the sociology of education, human rights education, higher education, and social justice education

Felisa Tibbitts is UNESCO Chair of Human Rights in Higher Education and Carla Atzema-Looman Chair in Human Rights Education in the Human Rights Centre (SIM) at Utrecht University (Netherlands). She is also Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Political Science at Columbia University. Her research and policy interests include peace, human rights, and global citizenship education; curriculum policy and reform; critical pedagogy; and human rights and higher education transformation.

André Keet holds the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University and is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Engagement and Transformation at the same university. He is a former Visiting Professor at the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality, Carnegie School of Education, Leeds Beckett University, UK, and the 2018 Marsha Lilien Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. He publishes on human rights, higher education transformation, and critical university studies.