Human Rights

Conceptualising human rights as culture brings the importance of media into view – whilst avoiding mediacentrism. Media are very little studied in relation to human rights, especially in comparison to work on humanitarianism. The fields of humanitarianism and human rights do overlap, most obviously around the value of ‘humanity’. But where justice is the overarching motif of human rights, that of humanitarianism is charity. This chapter develops a theoretical framework to inform and to inspire more work on the study of legacy media - which is generally framed by ‘banal nationalism’ - and scalable social media - which seems to promise so much for campaigning on human rights.