Our consensus on what constitutes a human right dates back only to the 1940s, when the global human rights imagination first began to take shape. In this lecture, Mark Philip Bradley chronicles the complex histories that have formed our contemporary understanding of human rights and illustrates how that understanding has become a force behind international and local politics. In particular, he addresses the Indian Supreme Court’s decision last December to uphold Section 377, the colonial-era law that criminalizes sexual activities “against the order of nature,” most notably, gay sex.

Mark Philip Bradley is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of International History in the Department of History and the College, chair of the Committee on International Relations, and faculty director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago. He is the author and coeditor of several books, including the forthcoming “The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination” and “Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn.”

More about the UChicago Harper Lectures: http://alumniandfriends.uchicago.edu/...


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