China through a Global Lens: Making Human Rights in the Vernacular: Plural Legalities and Traveling Rights in India, China, and the U.S.A.

Part of the Fall 2007 Noon Lecture Series. Professor Sally Merry discusses the spread of human rights.

Tuesday, 11/06/2007
12:00PM - 1:00PM

Lecturer: Sally Merry, Professor of Anthropology, and Law and Society, New York University. How do human rights travel from their centers of creation to local communities? This presentation explores the process of translating human rights into the vernacular, arguing that as rights ideas travel and land, they do not stand alone but form assemblages of various kinds with other social movements. Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and of Law and Society at New York University. Her work explores the role of law in urban life in the US, in the colonizing process, and in contemporary transnationalism. She is currently doing a comparative, transnational study of human rights and gender. She was previously on the faculty of Wellesley College, where she was the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology. Her recent books are "Colonizing Hawai?i: The Cultural Power of Law" (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), which received the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, "Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice" (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and "The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Local and the Global," (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge University Press, 2007). She has authored or edited four other books: "Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai?i and Fiji" (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press, 2004), "The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation" (co-edited with Neal Milner, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), "Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working Class Americans" (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and "Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers" (Temple University Press, 1981). She has recently published articles on women's human rights, violence against women, and the process of localizing human rights.