Curating Human Rights

Robin Ostow is affiliated with the Sociology Department at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, Canada. She has published extensively on national museums, Jewish museums, immigration museums and human rights museums in Europe, the Americas and Australia. Most recently, her work has focused on these museums’ displays and their relations with the communities around them.

• 1. Introduction: human rights and the museums that display them; 2. Displaying the transatlantic slave trade: from cultural nationalism to universal human rights on the West Coast of Africa. The Maison des Esclaves, Gorée Island, Senegal 1966-2023; 3. Reimagining citizenship and human rights in a museum of land restitution: District Six Museum, Cape Town, South Africa; 4. The Museum as a laboratory for a human rights-based future: The International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK; 5. From containing memories of past violence to supporting a human rights-based revolution: The Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile: 2006 – 2023; 6. Corporate citizenship and musealizing human rights: Coca-Cola and the Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, Georgia, US; 7. Decolonization and Musealizing Human Rights on the Canadian Prairie: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and The Museum for Canadian Human Rights Violations 2003 – 2023; 8. Human Rights Museums: Their contributions and achievements in promoting human rights. Their limitations and their challenges in the coming years

"The literature on genocide and human rights museums is in its infancy. In its historical reconstruction of six museums located in all corners of the globe, Curating Human Rights lays a massive foundation for anyone interested in the display of atrocity and trauma in the service of universal values.They will not be able to go past Robin Ostow's argument that the path from the former to the latter is crooked and uneven. A major accomplishment."A. Dirk Moses, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, USA"Robin Ostow’s enterprising and original survey of human rights museums registers the emergence of a worldwide trend and opens it to critical and sophisticated analysis. Why is the wave happening? What political work is being done through it? The book engages these questions and more and is an indispensable success in doing so."Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University, USA