Images and Human Rights: Local and Global Perspectives

This book explores issues of creation, distribution, and control of images through official and unofficial sources, asking what impact that has had on human rights and what the ethical implications are.

The volume includes research from healthcare advocates, human rights scholars and activists, photographers, and visual anthropologists who see a need for more careful contextual interpretation of images in global and local settings. It represents diverse forms of scholarship and the ever-changing field of research methodologies, and it examines how human rights issues take advantage of visual methodologies and how the visual works to communicate these issues with the public. As such, this collection will be useful for researchers studying in the fields of visual culture and human rights.


Nancy Lipkin Stein is a visual anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University, USA, where she has explored bringing anthropology to the general public. She helped initiate a community-based history museum to focus on bringing visibility to lesser known histories. Her research interests include how images can create and communicate identity for places as well as individuals, and how images challenge or educate people.

Alison Dundes Renteln is Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California, USA. She is a Public Law scholar, whose expertise includes bioethics and human rights, and her research focuses on cultural rights, including the use of cultural defence in legal systems around the world.

"Images and Human Rights presents analysis and discussion that broadens the perspective and awareness of the reader. It suggests promising lines of future inquiry and asks the sorts of questions that all those interested in communication of human rights — be they an activist, scholar, educator, or practitioner — will benefit from reflecting upon."

Josh Pemberton Harvard Law School Harvard Human Rights Journal, 30 (2017)

"This timely volume offers an impressively rich multi-disciplinary collection of engaging and thoughtful essays on the role of the visual in protesting against social injustices and promoting human rights. It represents an invaluable contribution to debates on human rights representations and public action, paying much-needed attention to both image-makers and the subjects and communities they depict. Contributors to this book offer careful and sensitive analyses of images in a wide range of cultural and human rights contexts."

Dr Shani Orgad Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics

"Mining the intersection of two fundamental concepts – pictures and human rights – this volume brings original perspectives to the topics. The authors reveal complex social, aesthetic, legal, and political dimensions of images and image-making. After reading these provocative case studies, it is difficult to look at images of people without reflecting on the dynamics of culture and power behind their creation and dissemination. Collectively, the essays make a compelling case for image-making not only as a human impulse, but also as a human right."

Peter Tokofsky J. Paul Getty Museum

"This insightful volume informs us on important tenets of visual anthropology as an exploratory human rights project with a powerful potential to shape and raise critical awareness about politics and ethics of representation. [It is] highly recommended for anyone interested in film studies, visual anthropology and photography!"
Olga Ulturgasheva
University of Manchester

Sarah Brown

Susan Dyess

Fabiene Gama

Aubrey Graham

Anastasia Klupchak

Michel Angela Martinez

Andra Opalinski

Alison Dundes Renteln

Rina Sherman

Tok Thompson

Katherine Wahlberg

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-9988-7

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-9988-8

Release Date: 30th November 2016

Pages: 265

Price: £59.99

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ISBN: 1-5275-0933-8

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-0933-7

Release Date: 5th June 2018

Pages: 265

Price: £46.99

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