Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice

Sandra Ristovska, Monroe Price, Sandra Ristovska, Monroe Price

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319759869
• eBook ISBN: 9783319759876
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice examines the interplay between images and human rights, addressing how, when, and to what ends visuals are becoming a more central means through which human rights claims receive recognition and restitution. The collection argues that accounting for how images work on their own terms is an ever more important epistemological project for fostering the imaginative scope of human rights and its purchase on reality. Interdisciplinary in nature, this timely volume brings together voices of scholars and practitioners from around the world, making a valuable contribution to the study of media and human rights while tackling the growing role of visuals across cultural, social, political and legal structures.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sandra Ristovska and Monroe Price (eds.)Visual Imagery and Human Rights PracticeGlobal Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75987-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Images and Human Rights

Sandra Ristovska¹ and Monroe Price²

(1)

University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

(2)

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Sandra Ristovska

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This is a book about the interplay between visuals and human rights. It stems from the recognition that the visual turn has been having immense consequences, across the board, in the many practices related to the definition, implementation and enforcement of important international norms and visions for human rights. Different institutions—governments, courts, donors, NGOs and the media—as well as various practitioners—human rights activists, supporters and opponents—all have been adjusting their efforts to take into account the visual component in ways far exceeding its representational function in human rights practice. Images are no longer merely an illustration on the side or just a vehicle for advocacy; they have become a critical evidentiary tool and a mode of information relay on their own terms as well. The capacity to include images—strongly defined, increasingly tested for impact—has been harnessed in ways that might alter discourses, might privilege some players over others, might present different ethical issues, and might make, in general, a more powerful role for human rights and the greater achievement of long-desired objectives.

This collection of essays is therefore an exercise in how, if at all, understanding both the visual forms of knowledge production and the wide-ranging image-making practices of various actors can extend the epistemological horizon for contemporary human rights work. In doing so, this collection builds upon an established scholarly tradition that looks at the role of images in the context of human rights and humanitarian communication: how images are constitutive of ethical and political issues (e.g., Azoulay 2008; McLagan and McKee 2012; Sliwinski 2011); how they mobilize publics on human rights issues (e.g., Ristovska 2016; Torchin 2012; Zelizer 1998); how they position the viewer in moral engagement with human rights abuse victims (e.g., Boltanski 1999; Chouliaraki 2006, 2013); and how critical visual skills are vital for understanding the production of evidence with its associated practices, turning forensis into a form of political and legal activism (Weizman 2014, 2017). This book augments this scholarship by looking at how, when and why visual knowledge shapes human rights practices. Focusing on the production, definition and usage of images in their multiple permutations—such as painting, photography, video, balloon mapping, satellites and drones—by diverse networks of institutions and practitioners, the chapters document the prominent role of the visual across the mechanisms that generate, bolster, challenge or undermine what counts as human rights.

This book also makes a methodological intervention in human rights discourses. It brings together scholarship and practice from around the world in human rights, media studies, communication, journalism, activism, social movements, law, geography, history, archiving and documentary filmmaking, all enriching the visual field from various vantage points in search for answers, provocations and proposals for how and why visual epistemologies, when taken seriously, can broaden our thinking about human rights. Neither exhaustive nor conclusive, this collection provides a thin description of the entanglement between visuals and human rights. In self-describing this edited collection as thin description, we borrow from John Jackson (2013) who calls for a “flat ethnography, where you slice into a world from different perspectives, scales, registers and angles—all distinctively useful, valid and worthy of considerations” (p. 16). Moving away from historical assumptions that ethnography can—or should—provide a complete account embedded in the concept of thickness, thin description, for Jackson, privileges dialogue across different communities and knowledge producers. Thin does not mean less substantial; instead, it usefully and fruitfully acknowledges the relativity and partiality that the notion of thick description elides.

The application of Jackson’s concept of thin description to this collection specifically, and the study of visuals and human rights more broadly, is important on three levels. It offers a methodological accommodation for the partiality of any individual assessment. It encourages dialogue with various stakeholders that put images into service to human rights. And it recognizes the multifaceted portrayals that any visual documentation carries. The particular and diverse positionalities of the researcher, human rights practitioner, activist and image user are methodologically as relevant as the “flatness” of the visual, which is never a transparent medium of communication, but one situated within cognitive, cultural, social and political relations. This is an approach, then, which is a testimony to the incompleteness of any visual record despite the urge to operationalize its status as an undeniable portrayal of the real. And this is precisely where the power of the visual rests because, epistemologically, images resist totalizing discourses. Their evidentiary, emotional and imaginative scope is what makes them a rich record and a powerful persuasive and mnemonic device all at once. The methodological affordances of thin description, then, allow us to examine both more carefully and more imaginatively how images shape the recognition and restitution of human rights claims.

In our organization of the chapters, we have created three categories: technologies, platforms and agents, always seeking how the interaction among these three alter human rights practices. We are not at this juncture capable of addressing fully how the interplay among technologies, platforms and agents systematically functions (if there is a systematic function to that interaction), nor can we clearly and cleanly identify which activities are mostly, for example, technologies, independent of platforms or agents. Yet, it is useful to have this tripartite division. States may respond differently to an action if it can easily identify an agent and regulate its behavior. Calling or identifying something as a platform also has consequences because the culture of how to treat and conceptualize platforms has continued to develop (e.g., Price 2015). And naming a train of activities as a product of technology sometimes cloaks it in greater neutrality, which could leave assumptions with great consequences unchallenged. At the same time, paying attention to evolving visual technologies and platforms as created or implemented by various agents could stretch the limits of normative human rights discourses and urge us to think more imaginatively about the current role of human rights.

Part 1: Technologies

Technologies shape the material relay of knowledge. How technologies are implemented or restricted is closely connected to how publics learn about and respond to human rights violations. Aryeh Neier (2013), co-founder of Human Rights Watch and former director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has argued that the development of information technologies—augmenting the various civil rights movements and the boom of nongovernmental organizations—has been central to the growth of the international human rights movement during the 1970s. One could imagine what might be called a strategic technological infrastructure that facilitates the projection of a human rights advocacy rich in visual cues across national frontiers.

Of course, human rights practitioners have long deployed a wide-ranging set of technologies for investigative, documentary and activist purposes; what is worth studying is adjustment to new technologies and techniques that can potentially have new kinds of impacts. Technological developments alter, as well, the way that states, as agents, think about their powers and roles. After all, technological change remains at the crossroad of ever more complicated struggles for narrative legitimacy among state and non-state actors locally, nationally and globally (Price 2015). In this process, changes in visual technologies—through their ability to create, circulate and display imagery that generates, accentuates, weakens or negates narrative claims about abuses of rights—become a crucial site for understanding knowledge production, diffusion and reception in the realm of human rights.

The chapters in this section interrogate an array of visual technologies to understand their role in shaping and potentially expanding the ways human rights claims get articulated and legitimized. They also call for new ways for thinking about visual technologies at times when the stakes are too high to be ignored. One example is Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s chapter which examines the evolution of visual technologies, focusing on a particular context over time. Alexandrowicz has examined and depicted a specific rendition of the Israeli Occupation in the city of Hebron. His is a dramatic history of how technologies shape visual meaning making. His study reflects changes that are quite pronounced in terms of the mechanical opportunities of the documentarian. Newsreels and newscasts are supplemented with long form documentaries and YouTube videos and, indeed, with the product of automated surveillance cameras. As a documentary filmmaker, Alexandrowicz is an agent skillful in testing various technologies for capturing images and then adapting to platforms for their diffusion. In his taxonomy, different tools or technologies alter the power structure of who can affect, and how, representation of significant events. Applying this approach to accounts of Hebron, he questions the documentary function of the camera as a “weapon of the weak.”

A highly current example of the change in technology and its capacity to impact visual approaches to human rights is asking whether and how drones can become part of the activist toolkit. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick looks at the evolution of camera devices from camera obscura to satellites and drones to illustrate not only the different ways of seeing they generate but also the various imaginaries they sustain about what human rights are or could be. By questioning how technological modalities—to borrow from Gillian Rose (2015)—drive the forms, meanings and effects of images, he cautions against technological determinism. New devices complement data-gathering and storytelling efforts but they also strain existing laws and norms about transparency, accountability and surveillance. For Choi-Fitzpatrick, attention to visual technologies generates fruitful discussions concerning human rights norms with the technological change itself becoming a factor of how those norms are or should be perceived. Drones pierce old arrangements and empower agents in the process.

New technologies shift the power of information from those who were exclusive holders of secrets to those who can be now newly informed. Drawing on his experiences as an image analyst at Amnesty International, Christoph Koettl illustrates the significance of this shift by describing the potential and challenges of combining satellite and open source visuals as “the strongest cases of documentation” in current human rights practice in the NGO sector. Space-based remote sensing and camera-enabled cell phones have altered the modes of gathering and displaying evidence. Koettl, therefore, also sheds light on the changes these new technologies yield in the responsibilities of the agent: new diagnostic and analytic skills are now required from the human rights community for vetting, collating, verifying and describing satellite and eyewitness images for investigative purposes.

The point of combining technologies and understanding the implications of their associated information has given birth to the concept of Geospatial Intelligence or GEOINT. The power of what might be called “humanitarian surveillance” is reviewed by James R. Walker, who examines how remote sensing technologies are strategically employed to legitimize, perhaps too easily, interventions under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Walker cautions about the military origins of GEOINT and the implications for how such material is organized and used even in UN peacekeeping contexts. His chapter demonstrates the intimate relationship between the reshaping of technologies and the altered challenges for agents employing the results of that technology. GEOINT not only creates knowledge and presents it, but also organizes it in specific terms and in ways designed to prompt action. Walker questions whether the underlying contextual narratives that underpin GEOINT and their potential effect on human rights campaigns (given the application of a military derived technological framework) “recursively shape its own context and usage in both quasi-military and strictly humanitarian environments.”

Intensive use of new technologies can alter the legal environment and challenge constitutional understandings. Police body cameras proliferate and their increased ubiquity may redefine how one thinks about place and its sanctity. Rebecca Wexler’s legal analysis of police body camera programs in the United States has general implications. She suggests thinking about current video technologies not on the spectrum of photography, film and older iterations of video but “as part of a technological continuum of wearable and indiscriminate sensor-data collection devices,” which gather not only visual data but also vast pools of other kinds of information that can upend ways of thinking about privacy. The essay also explores the role of courts and judges in shaping an epistemology necessitated by the interface of new technologies with existing frames of analysis.

Part 2: Platforms

We turn to changes in platforms that alter the impact of the use of new technologies. Visual imagery in its multiple manifestations requires platforms through which human rights witnessing can be manifested and sustained. Creating and exploiting platforms is a necessary response by communicators—states, human rights advocates or others—to the complexity of modern communication flows. The idea of platforms captures the process of finding an effective space to consolidate and diffuse a vision and to crowd out the competition of alternate statements. Platforms can be the venue for competition for elaborately created fora as means to advance messages deemed to be significant. Institutional needs to engage audiences have contributed to a rise in visual platforms across digital spaces and formal structures through which human rights claims are made, challenged or given restitution. As mechanisms that enable “the presentation of information in a way that facilitates its promotion and accessibility and aids its legitimacy” (Price 2015, p. 194), platforms are important zones for engagement with human rights, serving different needs and purposes.

An example of the changing salience of particular platforms is the growing use of archives and collections of video testimony. In this section of the book, Christian Delage explores the platforms used to collect and redistribute the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. He does so using the written and oral testimonies of Simon Srebnik between 1945 and 2003. In the process, Delage argues that platforms capable of audiovisual transmission communicate the human rights survivors’ body language, voice texture and moments of silence that are as critical for understanding trauma as the content of the testimony itself. He thus recommends that established archives need to think about new platforms for the preservation of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies in the future. By concentrating on the testimonial accounts of o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Images and Human Rights
• Part I. Technologies
• Part II. Platforms
• Part III. Agents
• Part IV. Afterword