Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights

Tristan Anne Borer is professor of government and international relations at Connecticut College in New London, CT.

• Introduction: willful ignorance - news production, audience reception, and responses to suffering - Tristan Anne Borer1. Humanitarian intervention in the 1990s: cultural remembrance and the reading of Somalia as Vietnam - David Kieran2. Framing a rights ethos: artistic media and the dream of a culture without borders - Michael Galchinsky3. How editors choose which human rights news to cover: a case study of Mexican newspapers - Ella McPherson4. Framing strategies for economic and social rights in the United States - Dan Chong5. 'Fresh, wet tears': shock media and human rights awareness campaigns - Tristan Anne Borer6. Celebrity diplomats as mobilizers? Celebrities and activism in a hypermediated time - Andrew F. Cooper and Joseph F. Turcotte7. Amplifying individual impact: social media's emerging role in activism - Sarah Kessler8. The spectacle of suffering and humanitarian intervention in Somalia - Joel R. Pruce

This is the book that scholars in the humanities and human rights have been waiting for. Together, its contributors push perennial questions about the relationship between violence and the image, between seeing and acting, and between the aspirations and the limits of cosmopolitanism to new levels of understanding. Theoretically sophisticated and historically substantial, the eminently readable essays in this volume employ impeccable close readings and analysis, case studies, and empirical evidence to advance powerful conclusions regarding the role of the media and cultural texts in struggles for recognition of global suffering and, alternatively, for building cultures of human rights.