The Transforming Power of Cultural Rights A Promising Law and Humanities Approach

Cultural rights promote cultural and scientific creativity. Transformative and empowering, they also enable the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, thereby working as atrocity prevention tools. The Transforming Power of Cultural Rights argues that this gives these rights a central role to play in promoting the full human personality and in realizing all other human rights. Looking at the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs in the field of cultural rights as well as UNESCO's efforts, Helle Porsdam addresses the question of how a universal human rights agenda can include a dialogue that recognizes the importance of cultural diversity without sliding into cultural relativism. She argues that cultural rights offer a useful international arena and discourse in which to explain and negotiate cultural meanings when controversies arise. This places them at the center of human rights - and at the center of law and humanities.

Introduction; Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. Law and humanities: a cultural rights perspective; 2. Television judge shows: rights talk and popular culture; Part II. Cultural Rights: 3. The queen of human rights: on the right to education and Malala Yousafzai, I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban; 4. The right to take part in cultural life: on cultural heritage, identity, and Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence; 5. The right to science: issues, challenges, and Pernille Rørth, Raw Data; 6. Copyright, patents, author's rights, and the right to culture and science; Part III. Connecting Main Themes and Arguments: 7. A global human rights priority: on gender and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.

Helle Porsdam is Professor of Law and Humanities and UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the author of Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (1999) and From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues in Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (2009).