The Idea of a Human Rights Museum

Karen Busby, Adam Muller, Andrew Woolford

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780887554698
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Menschenrechte

"The Idea of a Human Rights Museum" is the first book to examine the formation of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and to situate the museum within the context of the international proliferation of such institutions. Sixteen essays consider the wider political, cultural and architectural contexts within which the museum physically and conceptually evolved drawing comparisons between the CMHR and institutions elsewhere in the world that emphasize human rights and social justice.This collection brings together authors from diverse fields—law, cultural studies, museum studies, sociology, history, political science, and literature—to critically assess the potentials and pitfalls of human rights education through "ideas" museums. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the collection's essays will encourage museum-goers to think more deeply about the content of human rights exhibits. The Idea of a Human Rights Museum is the first title in the University of Manitoba Press's Human Rights and Social Justice Series. This series publishes work that explores the quest for social justice and the basic rights and freedoms to which all human beings are entitled, including civil, political, economic, social, collective, and cultural rights.

GROUNDING THE CANADIAN MUSEUM FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN CONVERSATION

CHAPTER 1

Ken Norman

In January 2009, I accepted an invitation from the acting chief executive officer of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) to become a member of a new body called the Content Advisory Committee (CAC). The Report to the Minister of Canadian Heritage on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights had called for creation of the CAC: “It is recommended that an independent group of human rights scholars, specialists and leaders be appointed to elicit relevant information from individuals, organizations and groups. The CAC would work closely with CMHR staff for the purposes of ensuring that the Board and CMHR have the capacity and authority to acknowledge conflict, provide a balanced perspective and acknowledge and manage controversy. The members of the CAC should be chosen to play the role of advisors rather than advocates for special interest groups.”1 For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on the mandate given to the CAC in the first sentence of this recommendation. The second sentence speaks to the Report to the Minister’s envisioning of a long “operating” role for the CAC.2 However, as it turned out, the CAC was given only a preliminary finite task: “to listen to Canadians in a public engagement process and offer our expert advice on what we heard.”3 The CAC was disbanded shortly after filing its Final Report in May 2010.

In our planning meetings in early 2009, there was much debate on the point of our public engagement process. Were our community consultations an exercise in acquiring a “collection” for the CMHR? Were they primarily a public relations exercise in building support for the CMHR? Or were they less about listening, collecting, and pitching and more about public engagement? We landed on the final proposition: “Our role in assisting the Museum to develop content is remarkable. In a break from museum convention—where the authority tends to be firmly in the hands of museum ‘experts,’ to the exclusion of all others—there was a space created for knowledge contributions from the public as well as from the Content Advisory Committee.”4 We established as a key modality in our cross-Canada tour, beginning on 27 May 2009 in my home city, Saskatoon, a very public roundtable exercise. In advance of our visit to a city, an evening public forum was advertised in local media. The venue would be an accessible site such as a library or community hall. After showing a short video, we spent about an hour and a half facilitating discussions around tables of eight or so people. Facilitators asked what those at the table would like to experience in the CMHR. We hoped that participants in the roundtables would feel that they were engaged with us in that discussion.5

My strong support for this conversational exercise was generally informed by three different phases of my professional life. First was my fresh memory of disconcerting experiences as a member of two successive advisory committees established by Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights beginning in 2005, with experts talking with designers and consultants in boardrooms with the doors closed as if one need not look elsewhere for knowledge of human rights. Second were my rewarding years as a human rights law teacher guided by Yeats’s insight that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.6 Third was my stint as the first chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, where my statutory mandate to promote human rights—amounting to little more than a few speeches and boxes of pamphlets—gained little apparent ground in fostering a human rights culture in the province. Thus, I was predisposed to the idea that, if the “for human rights” in the CMHR’s name was to have life, one would have to find ways to engage people respectfully, to kindle the fire of a human rights culture in them.

Specifically, I had just read three books with historical and theoretical insights that had stoked such a fire within me. First, Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History7 illustrated how, in the eighteenth century, because of the advent of the epistolary novel in Europe, empathy for the suffering of other human beings spread beyond insular communities, resulting in the rejection of torture as a punishment and slavery as a practice. Reading Hunt’s book brought to mind Richard Rorty’s contention that “pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories.”8 The lesson for the CMHR that I took from this claim was the prospect of finding ways to spark a more expansive understanding of suffering humanity in all of its diversity—of growing a human rights culture—through the use of personal stories to achieve an empathic appreciation of what it might be like to walk in the shoes of the other.9

Second, Johannes Morsink’s Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration10 drew from debates in the Third Committee of the United Nations preceding proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) for the proposition that human rights are fundamental moral birthrights of our common humanity, knowable by everyone:11 “It is through their moral sentiments that people discover the metaphysical universality of human rights.”12 For me, the epistemological point here was fundamental. Scholars and curators had no trumping claim to knowledge in answering the contested question, what are human rights? Everyone had the right to contribute to the content of human rights discourse. With this theoretical guidance, it seemed to me that the CAC was clearly seeking knowledge from just the right people by democratizing the CMHR’s content development process in our public engagement tour.

Third, reading Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice,13 I was taken by his conception of human rights discourse as a public conversation of a particular kind, an exercise in “open impartiality,” which “not only admits but requires consideration of the views of others.”14 “Human rights,” Sen claims, “are ethical claims constitutively linked with the importance of human freedom, and the robustness of an argument that a particular claim can be seen as a human right has to be assessed through the scrutiny of public reasoning, involving open impartiality.”15 His Smithsonian idea of “open impartiality” is a call for reasoned public argument in dealing with conflicting claims seeking common ground and rejecting the lazy relativism of “you are right in your community and I am right in mine.”16 Sen explains that the UDHR’s grand moral proclamations frame public debates around what is to be done about perceived violations of human rights.17

Of course, such conversations can result in dissonance. However, as Sen notes, Bernard Williams has argued that “disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome.”18 What is required is open acknowledgement that there are plural and competing reasons for what is to be done in the name of human rights—“all of which have claims to impartiality and which nevertheless differ from—and rival—each other.”19 Sen’s commitment to such a possibly dissonant public conversation—seeking common human rights ground across vast differences of conviction and life experience—struck me as setting exactly the right raison d’être for the CAC’s cross-Canada public engagement tour and for the CMHR to take to heart.20

Running alongside the roundtables were two other elements in the CAC’s journey: “bilaterals” and oral history videos. We held bilateral meetings with individuals and groups whom members of t...

Table of contents

• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• THE IDEA OF A HUMAN RIGHTS MUSEUM
• CHAPTER 1
• CHAPTER 2
• CHAPTER 3
• CHAPTER 4
• SPATIALIZATION AND DESIGN
• CHAPTER 5
• CHAPTER 6
• CHAPTER 7
• CURATORIAL CHALLENGES
• CHAPTER 8
• CHAPTER 9
• CHAPTER 10
• CHAPTER 11
• PARALLELS AND OBLIGATIONS
• CHAPTER 12
• CHAPTER 13
• CHAPTER 14
• CHAPTER 15
• CHAPTER 16
• AFTERWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• CONTRIBUTORS