Between the Global and the Local: Human Rights Discourse and Engagement in Two New York City High Schools

While there has been a rise in human rights education at the global level, little attention has been paid to how it is integrated into schools in the United States. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected in two diverse high schools across an academic year, S. Garnett Russell investigates the extent to which human rights education influences students' knowledge and attitudes about human rights and how students engage with and translate global human rights into the local context. Although the majority of students in the study showed a superficial understanding or sense of distance around global human rights issues, Russell finds that students were better able to “vernacularize” universal notions of rights into their own local context, particularly around issues linked to police brutality and racial discrimination. Findings from the study point to the importance of human rights education, particularly for marginalized students.