Overview

What happens to the cultural politics of human rights when atrocities are rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organizations have increasingly embraced information technologies this 'datafication' of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, one inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights. Combining contemporary social and cultural theory with archival research and original ethnographic work, Josh Bowsher resituates recent critiques of human rights within ongoing theoretical discussions concerning informational capitalism, digital culture and the politics of data. Critically analysing the contemporary human rights movement as an informational politics, Bowsher provides a new conceptual agenda for both exploring and overcoming the limits of human rights in an era shaped by the data flows, network infrastructures and informational logic of late capitalism.

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9781399509916

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Into the struggle to understand how human rights politics arose in tandem with the neoliberal economics of our times steps Josh Bowsher with a revelatory new framework. The age of human rights has also been the age of information -- and the informational mode prevalent in our phase of capitalism has caged a potentially radical politics. Exploring how this has happened, often reducing movements to shame and stigma, without engaging distribution and redistribution as readily, this intrepid book also looks to a future liberated from existing limitations. --Samuel Moyn, Yale University

Author Information

Josh Bowsher is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex, following a recently completed Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Brunel University. Broadly speaking, Josh's research explores the often-fraught relationships between human rights discourses, contemporary capitalism and radical change. His work has been published in Social & Legal Studies, The European Journal of Social Theory, New Formations, and Theory & Event.

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