Human Rights and Global Studies – Bachelor of Arts Degree
Streams
Career Options
Coordinator
Coordinator
Dean E. Peachey, PhD
Phone: 204.988.7106
Email: d.peachey@uwinnipeg.ca
HRGS provides you with the opportunity to structure your education around the study of social justice, global citizenship, and human rights. Because 'human rights’ is understood in multiple ways, this major takes an interdisciplinary approach to its core courses and in each of the three streams of elective courses.
The program offers three streams of study: Reading and Writing Human Rights; Society, Culture, and Economy; Institutions, Law, and Politics.
Degree requirements and course descriptions are available here.
For more information, please see our additional pages:
Streams
Stream 1: Reading and Writing Human Rights
Our knowledge of the global world is conveyed to us largely through texts and images; our struggle to work for human rights and social justice is equally dependent on our ability to communicate with each other. Within the context of globalization, communication strategies often occur on a terrain defined by the dominance of western cultures, languages, frameworks, and technologies. Students choosing courses from this Stream will be encouraged to understand that communication is not neutral; it is implicated in structures of power that work at all levels of society. Students will develop skills necessary for a critical engagement with received wisdoms, with media, and with the ways in which the common sense of the world serves to advantage some and disadvantage others. Students will have the opportunity to engage a range of communication practices and strategies in this context, and to consider the ways in which they intersect with and shape specific human rights discourses. At the same time, students have an opportunity to consider bodies of literature – postcolonial, aboriginal, diasporic, gay/lesbian – which have contributed in various ways to the development and articulation of particular human rights issues. Students in this stream are strongly encouraged to achieve proficiency in one additional European or First Nations language.
Stream 2: Society, Culture and Economy
This stream highlights the exploration of globalization, understood broadly as referring to a range of social, cultural, and economic processes, and focuses on the struggle to achieve social justice and human rights in a world in which the global spread of western norms, values, priorities, and practices is increasingly met with resistance, both violent and non-violent, at the local level. Courses in this stream provide students with a range of critical perspectives on globalization, and insights into historical and present-day global practices which have brought people into contact with one another. Students are provided with opportunities to study social, cultural, and economic practices that derive from non-western perspectives, and to consider the challenges which confront us when the ethical or normative values informing human rights perspectives exist in tension or conflict.
Stream 3: Institutions, Law and Politics
Courses in this stream provide students with the opportunity to explore the political, legal, and institutional framework (at local, national, and international levels) according to which human rights and social justice are defined, and within which the struggle to achieve human rights and social justice occurs. Students will consider how these structures operate in historical and present-day contexts at the international and domestic levels, how they have evolved in the context of globalization, and how they intersect with relations of power. Students are further exposed to ethical and legal perspectives on the relationship between the state and its citizens, and on our obligations to one another.
Career Options
The program is designed to prepare students for positions in:
- International rights and advocacy organizations
- International non-profit organizations
- International Aid Organizations
- Humanitarian and Refugee Organizations
- Academia