Opening Symposium with Samuel Moyn, Thomas Keenan, Ariella Azoulay, Mark Mazower, Felicity Scott, Elazar Barkan, and Yasmine Ergas
The Visualizing Universalism symposium marks the opening of a new exhibition at Columbia University’s Buell Hall (through May 19) publicly displaying the original 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition and its archive for the first time in 60 years. This exhibition was the first international event that sought to visually represent the history and meaning of the then-recently adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Using the exhibition as a platform for critical debate on contemporary human rights culture, the symposium explores insights provided by UNESCO’s first attempt to visualize and historicize the UDHR. In three sessions we will discuss the exhibition’s historical context, its teleological narrative, and the ways in which human rights are represented and disseminated through visual culture – questions pertinent to both the exhibition and to contemporary discussions of human rights.
Symposium co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia Maison Française, Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research, and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
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