Can the Arts Save Human Rights? Human Rights Truth-Claims in a Post-Truth Era

Human rights is in crisis. Recent political upheavals - Trump, Brexit, the rise of populist political parties, certain responses to COVID-19 - have both globalised a post-truth politics and embedded them in Western democracies. These upheavals mean that we are at a moment of transition and contention globally. Established languages of social justice, such as human rights, are under siege while new languages struggle to be born.

The research engages with two hypotheses. First, that collaborative visual artistic practices involving artists and activists illuminate a downgrading of facts in human rights work, and a search for alternative or complementary frames and narratives (new languages or idioms that are primarily visual, performative, and virtual). Second, that co-created visual art sheds light on a shift not only from facts to frames/narratives, but also to countering post-truth forms of denial. Collaboration is our focus because of its experimental, imaginative and interdisciplinary potential to inform new languages or idioms of human rights. It is an exciting element of a solidarity politics in the post-truth era.

The project is co-hosted by the Centre for Applied Human Rights (CAHR), University of York, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), as a collaborating organisation. CAHR has a decade of experience working at the intersection of the arts and human rights, while the YSP has a long-standing interest in linking the arts to social justice and policy and practice debates. Partners supporting the research - academic partners, country-based arts organisations and human rights agencies, and the international development NGO, ActionAid - share a commitment to using the arts to mobilise social change, and provide diverse insights into the arts-activism nexus, deep knowledge of collaborative practice, and access to a wide range of physical and online public/community spaces.

This research project combines two hitherto discrete bodies of research and practice. The first strand includes 3 Work Packages drawing on work by CAHR: 1) Arctivism, a collaboration between CAHR and the Open Society Foundations, which funds activists-artists collaborations across the world responding to COVID-19. 2) Development alternatives, a collaboration between CAHR and ActionAid, which engages activists, artists and academics intending to imagine alternatives to mainstream international development. 3) York Human Rights City network, a multi-stakeholder initiative that established York as the UK's first human rights city and seeks to operationalise human rights at a local level and develop a city-based culture of human rights. The second strand features 2 Work Packages relating to transitional justice, a field that informs how countries affected by authoritarian rule and conflict address the past. The cases are Colombia (ongoing transitional justice) and Canada (post-transitional justice).

As such, the Work Packages span local, national and global levels; the past, present and future; and intersections between major contemporary crises (attacks on global democracy and human rights, COVID-19, global poverty and inequality, climate change). The research for each Work Package is organised in three stages: a first, scoping stage taking stock of existing work, which will then inform the funding and research accompaniment of new collaborations as a second stage. A third stage focuses on outputs, dissemination and impact.

A decolonial perspective - emphasising context, plural perspectives, challenging Western binaries - informs the interdisciplinary methods of the research, the range of artistic, practice-based and academic outputs envisaged, and the multiple routes to impact. The project will analyse and contribute to new languages or idioms of human rights, anticipating that these will embrace ambiguity, metaphor, irony, disruption, dissonance, and multiple possible readings.